Impressions on the Sea

I have just been to the beach the past couple of days and I must say that the beach in all its grandeur, awe, and unquestionnable beauty, that if a person makes a trip to the beach and fails to visit this very miracle where water and land collide at night...let that person go home and say he's never been to the beach. For what is refreshing and pretty by sunlight is praise-provoking and soul-inspiring by star and moonlight...and the person who thinks he or she has been at the beach in its full glory only in the daytime has undoubtily missed out. Beauty inspires us in the light; but oh how it ravishes us admist the darkness.
I used to be afraid of the ocean. And who wasn't? It's vastness, it's mystery, it's immeasurableness. When younger I almost drowned out towards the first sand bar. Whatever a person's experience is, if he or she stands on a pier or a ship at night and looks far out to where the dark waters mingle into the dark sky, where each is imperceptible, where nothing but blackness absorbs the eye...then a stifling terror is vibrated from the soles of one's feet to the top of one's skull cap. And what is this thing that we fear? The ocean and all its grandness...that swallows up everything and yet it's impenetrableness and this great emblem of the unknown is the very theme of what a person should fear, uncontainable danger shaking out on the horizon.

Further in and closer to the land the waves crash upon hardened sands and splatters its torrent into foamy bubbles. The Greeks believed that from this foam the goddess of love and beauty was born. How strange a thought...but perhaps there's some truth to that....being whereever water meets the land, where the unconscious meet the conscious, where one toppling ontop of the other, that beauty is first concieved. A place where something powerful and threatening tickles the very foot of man...that is the place of beauty. Where the very entity of grandness, of unfathomable quantity, laps at the smallest toe, is where beauty comes to life. And to stand at such a place on such a night was my mind's truest verification for these words.

But enough of sight. Upon sitting on the sands at night and closing the eyes, the sounds of the ocean itself I could write books on. There is this obstrusive ripping sound as though within that liquid tearing was recorded the sound of paradise being ripped away from man. It is the last vestige of a world of light, love, and beauty that was torn asunder in one giant cacophony of sound. And yet it still sounds upon the sands, an endless, bittersweet melody. It has ever since been the crash of the garden of man being flooded and toppled over. -A washing or purging of what is futile and not of the light of this earlier world.
Sometime, not very long ago, there was always this depression that i fell into that was associated with particularly cloudy days at the beach. Maybe it was because to be at the beach on a sunless day was vexing, but I think it had more to do with how smooth the seas seemed and how they represented something buried and deep within. How much boundlessness was actually out there and how little one is. As though the tug of something urging and quaking deep down within and one can only get a sense of the surface. Which is almost inexpressible. I never understood how sailors where supposed to be the most godless of men. To ride upon such vastness and danger,I would think, requires humility and reflection. But the element in my late adolescence and on further to almost present times produced a buried sense of brokenness or the element that something is amiss or just plain missing...and I could never exactly place it, just this dull ache that sets one brooding and not apprehending anything.

But back to the sound of the ocean and its quality. It is a very soothing music if one leans one's ear to it. I do not think that the earth has a more powerful and lofty music than that of the ocean. Some might criticize God for its lack of variation or originality. But its lack of variation is a sign of its originality. While winds stop, birds silence their chirping, people die, and crickets freeze in the wintertime, this sound is perhaps the only consistent sound in the universe. And the more I sat there the more it occurred to me, no matter how mad this may sound, hearing wave after wave, the sound of the ocean is God's own laughter. Both a deep strong bellow of a laugh in the over-all tumult and clash coupled with a gleeful, whimsical, joyful child's laughter heard, leaping giddily, in the rippling of the bubbles and foam. If it wasn't the sound of both, it wouldn't be the laughter of God. Crescendo after crescendo of laughter is heard mounting and vaulting into the skies and into the hearts of those who perceive truth. What is He laughing about? There may have been a time when I believed such laughter could only be jeers. But this is not so. The laughter is continual mirth being poured out of the throne of God. Go to the waves with your problems or your ego. You will hear this laughter shaking the earth. It sounds, "Forget the Past. It is Washed Away!" And though you try to think further within your closed-up mind, it laughs, "Do not Worry. You Approach the Eternal." And upon hearing this you have one of two options. To fear and be dumbfounded or to have the urge to join in the laughter and its self-assured joy. And though you think laughter a cruel farce for such a being that has year after year claimed the life of many man, woman, and child...how ironic, for in this giant rollicking laughter lies the substance and essence of life itself. Water. And if a man were to measure himself up against the seas, even on dry ground a man passing in front of its threshold...any evidence of his walking, these footprints are washed away in a matter of seconds. Though man walk up and down the same few yards beside these great waters there is to be no evidence of his standing. All things are eventually conquered in these waves.

Of all that I learned through experience on the beach is this. To merely sit in ankle-deep water is the stupidest thing one can do. One only knows the roar, violence, and brutality of the waves and not its tranquility when one is fully immersed. One is one minute almost surrounded by water but the next, nearly out of the water. He or she is only being tossed to and fro as has been written. In short, if one only sits at the brink of the ocean, he or she may look like a true sea-goer but in reality all they receive is sand in the britches.

Now more than ever...I have a true desire to go to sea. To sail upon its waters in the vibrant moonlight. (I mean that both literally and figuratively) What once was a source of dread, what once was a source of sorrow, is now slowly turning into a source of joy and inspiration and pure mystification. And I want to fathom its depths and power. I want to plunge into its somersaulting existence.