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I don't know why I'm thinking of this now, but there is nothing that calms me so deeply and thoroughly as the sea. Living water. Even rivers will do, the motion soothing, the glimpsed secrets beneath the surface eddies ... but the sea is something else. So many moods, in the sea. So many moods inside yourself when you watch it. Awe. Melancholy. Adventure. Connection. Intrigue. Something so deep, powerful, moving in slow, deep rhythms, feeding from the sky and the earth. There is peace in the thought of it, in the sense of it. The feeling inside you of the tides of the sea, the deep rivers that run through it, drifting, driving, pulsing. The sea touches everything, wraps itself around the world, hands clasped with the sky, current and wind and temperature linked and moving with each other, driving each other, cradling each other.
I read about it. Think about it. Sink deep into the world, touch the currents that drive it, the ebb and flow of forces that shape it. The sea, taking heat, holding cold, moving temperatures around the globe in ways the winds never could. It's ... so big, the connection. The links, the great cat's cradle of forces between sea and sky, moisture and heat and pressure and direction, showing and giving to the land, erosion and deposition, land taken and given back, winds driven and recieved, currents shaped and fed. A leviathan embracing the world, it's heart and center.
It's so much bigger and deeper than we give it credit for, so much more than something to fish out of and sail across. It's not a surface, not something to be moved over. It's a cradle, a crucible, the throbbing heart of systems that make our world all that it is. It drives the climate, you know. Storms, but more than that. Not just weather but bigger. Older. Back through time, forward to everything. The threads it holds, the depths, the connections, touching everything ... Gah! I can't explain. The sense of it, of the system, the slow silent motion deeper than time, the history of a world ... you can read that in the sea, you know. Ocean cores, sediments full of layers of foraminifera (tiny shellfish), that hold fossilised the changes of climate through the eons. The ice ages, the deeper history beyond them, it's all there. The flow of climate from cold to warm to cold to warm, a rhythm beating back through time ... and the sea remembers.
Even beyond that, looking only at now, at the surface, there is still so much that the sea holds. The rhythm of tide and current, the tumbling sensations of immersion, the sounds of it, the tumult and quiet, the peace and the awe. Storms, an elemental clash of wind and wave. The calm, the soft call of quiet life.
I'm in love with it. The sea. Even looking at pictures, only images, and still I feel it. On the boat, feeling the sway of the sea beneath your feet, in your bones. Standing on a cliff, to see the bigger view. On the shore, to watch it close and soothing. Swimming, to be a part of it, to feel the force of it, the gentleness, the danger. Thrown around by the waves, breathless and exhilerated and terrified. Soothed by gentler wash and backwash. Carried by longshore currents (but never rips, because those will kill you if you let them, carry you out and under and hold you until you drown - love the sea, but never trust her). And the life of the shore ... the drifting seaweeds, the fish, shellfish, birds, squid, crabs ... a drifting world, a violent and gentle world, passionate but aloof.
I love it all so much. *laughs* On every level, she hides and reveals in tantalising flashes, all her secrets from the depths of time and the breadth of the world, to the grains of sand and tiny creatures that she flashes beneath your feet. A gorgeous thing. A deadly thing. An ancient thing, and there was a reason they used to worship her, to fear her and respect her, and I don't understand why people think that now we understand her a little better, we shouldn't keep feeling those things. Everything she has revealed only gives more reason to the awe, the fear, the respect. She cradles the world. She drives it, and is driven in her turn. She is nothing that we might control, and for that alone she must be accorded her respect. She is beautiful and powerful, and for that she deserves her wonder.
I know why the elves of Middle Earth, though they loved their wood with all their hearts, could not turn away once they had glimpsed the sea. She does that.
She is that.
