the world seen from sea
dear friends,
a few weeks ago, I found myself four days at sea. there, inside the ocean waves - four days with the elements: wind, sky, moon, sun, water - four days without voices except for radio noise from passing boats, and long conversations with my host, I discovered a way of life so different from land life that it felt like discovering a parallel reality.
no one had told me about this world before. they only told me about sailing. but “sailing” existed in my mind as just an abstract idea — a high maintenance hobby, a pastime for the privileged. the lived experience is different. it is very technical, and a bit militaristic, but it also allowed me a gift I will treasure forever; a gift containing infinite poetry: the world seen from sea.
the world seen from sea is a world without time. here, the hours will slip like sand through your fingers, and you will notice only where the sun hangs in the sky, and how the heat falls on your skin. here, time is just a story told by light and shadow. the ocean transforms itself: at dawn, as soft as clear smoke; at midday, metallic and heavy, by dusk, turning smooth and silken, by moonlight, like a black crystal, shimmering.
this will happen day after day; now, and always now. by day three, you think to yourself that you could easily die here at sea, or become immortal. you could sail the world for a year, only to discover that everyone you’ve ever loved on land has aged, while you remained the same. it will be a soft kind of loneliness. you will remember how, in cities, you could easily forget the fact of nature. but now, you could easily forget the faces of cities.
before sunset, your captain will steer the boat into harbor, and all the cliches you’ve ever heard in your life about “safe harbor” will suddenly make sense, like a coin dropping into a pinball machine. after a day surrounded by water, the closeness of land will feel like a womb, or like spooning. so, is it like a parking lot, you ask. yes, he says, except there are no lines, and it’s free.
if you are very lucky, he will cook you a meal more indulgent than you can imagine eating on a boat. you will watch the sun disappear with a glass of rosé, and then, hours later, witness the moon rising; follow its path in an arc across the sky, look through binoculars and see that its beauty, too, is flawed.
by dark, the water will be so still and silent that all you hear is a distant echo of summer insects - so soft their wings seem imagined - and a few feet away, fish tails entering water - so close their scales seem touchable, and your fingertips, wet.
you will sleep in an aft cabin the size of a large closet. at four am, if the waves rock the boat, you’ll wake up in darkness to the cabin door banging against the wall, wake up as if still in a dream, no ocean in sight, but full of oceanic feeling: subliminal, dark, and deep.
when morning comes, you will feel as though you’ve woken up in someone’s tiny underground house; that is, until you climb the stairs, and discover that you’ve entered a balcony with no walls, and beyond that, three hundred and sixty degrees of world, naked before your eyes.
most of it will be ocean. the land will look like a long painting of trees, hills, and boathouses. you will feel a wild bliss, joy with every inhale. the ocean air: a sweet, intoxicating clarity.
that is the thing about being at sea. in the art of the earth, if all land is positive space, then all water is negative space. and in the negative space of things, there is the perception of infinity, of endless possibility. you look out into the horizon and see freedom in all directions, and in the third dimension, an unknowable depth.
and then, when you return to your land life, when you walk again your daily circuits, open and close your daily doors, you will remember this feeling. it is the feeling deep inside a hushed longing, that restrained question which says: isn’t there more to life than this? there must be more than what I can see in front of me with my own two eyes. there must more that I can dream. dare I go seek?
this, my friends, is what the ocean does for me. I am no sailor, no diver, and merely a mediocre swimmer, but somehow, my deluged heart and restless spirit are so soothed by the sea. my soul, inexplicably at home, in flow, in power, in surrender.
on bright afternoons, it laid down on the wooden deck of the boat and watched the entire sky pass. it listened to the white sail blowing in the wind, like a starchy linen sheet drying on a clothesline, about to be blown halfway across the world, or already blown; already here. here, in this place without history, without name, without time.
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9.30.19
PS. thank you Edwin for this gift.