Imagine an all-encompassing
portrait of the ocean—not just
the sunny beaches and fish swimming
among the corals
but an expansive web of symbiotic relationships,
complex needs,
competing interests and endless tales
of time, change, ingenuity and hard luck.
To truly understand a subject
you must follow all threads leading out
and examine how those threads relate to one another.
It’s tempting to recoil
from the chaos and to start to organize
but isn’t there something more honest,
less diluted,
in the full force of complexity?
We are, for better or worse, sea creatures of a sort—
all living things are, after all it is where life began.
Our lives in particular are intricately
entwined with the ocean web.
If you look you will find some reference
to the ocean in the paper every day.
It affects our economy, politics and environment.
It looms large in our stories, our scientific curiosity
and our physical and emotional needs.
In many ways we abuse our relationship
with the ocean—
overfishing, carbon emissions, oil spills…
but there is also an underlying visceral quality
to that relationship.
Its rhythms and moods match our own
but beyond that there’s something even more fundamentally physical at play.
Next time you go to the beach
check to see if I’m right about this.
When I draw near to the ocean
I see gulls and smell salty air
but I swear
I feel the ocean before I see it.
I sense its essence—like our own—vastly empty and infinitely full.
It feels as though the water that makes up my body
is being called home
and I am compelled to follow.
The solace of the sea
is its ability to pull us—as it does its own ocean spray—
back to completeness.
Art sometimes does the same for me.
It reminds me that each thing I see
be it
Rachel Carson testifying before Congress,
a happy baby splashing in the surf,
a cargo ship supporting our economy
while polluting our planet
sea monsters real and imagined
a polar bear, like a canary a coal mine, swimming for dear life
… these are all interconnected — part and parcel of being.
