At first it comes in rocky shapes. Then the ground gnaws it and the wind blows it. Then it's grainy seeds.
The sea. I always loved its coarse saltiness, how it seemed
to lay down and on the ground and thrust its waves sometimes in anger sometimes
in a light caress on the guilty shores. Oh, how the sea spreads its arms at a
perfect angle to embrace the sky in a perfect union. And that perfection has
something soothing in it, almost like a silent, implicit lullaby. I always knew
I loved the sea before I ever caught a glimpse of it. I would dream of its white, foamy waves surrounding my feet, then revealing the nakedness of my
toes, then covering them again in a cyclic motion whose universal rhythm spoke
to the soul. I would dream of the sea day and night until I got to see it.
Maybe it was just a natural urge to set yourself free and set on an adventure
or maybe it was something more. I've yet to find out. But when the magical
encounter happened I gazed into the distant horizons and watched the golden
star slowly take a dive into the mystical embrace between the sea and the
skies. I let the waves approach me and I was suddenly part of that ritual. My
feet were soaked by the same waters that drowned the sun for a whole night. Oh,
the lacy foam laying on my toes, in a suave apology for the coarse sand under
my feet. But I loved them both. A perfect harmony.
I looked down and the under the pressure of my feet tiny bits would engulf my toes. Covered up like never to be seen again. A raw touch, older than the sea. It's the sand and the secret way my feet slide in a slow dance. Grain over grain, the sand climbed over my feet and related them to some invisible creature. I looked up. The sea was relentlessly calling. Mad waves shouting a call I cannot understand. They come in semicolons, some bigger others smaller, but they come. And then they reach out for the shore, in a sissific endeavour to engulf it. Then a foamy defeat follows and a shameful retreat at sea. The relentlessness of the sea. Others and others follow to perform the maddening ritual. A faithful, perpetual thrusting of the waves older than me, older than you.
The sea, through the eyes of an old man:
He could not see the green of the shore now but only the
tops of the blue hills that showed white as though they were snow-capped and
the clouds that looked like high snow mountains above them. The sea was very
dark and the light made prisms in the water. The myriad flecks of the plankton
were annulled now by the high sun and it was only the great deep prisms in the
blue water that the old man saw now with his lines going straight down into the
water that was a mile deep.
The tuna, the fishermen called all the fish of that species
tuna and only distinguished among them by their proper names when they came to
sell them or to trade them for baits, were down again. The sun was hot now
and the old man felt it on the back of his neck and felt the sweat trickle down
his back as he rowed. I could just drift, he thought, and sleep and put a bight of
line around my toe to wake me. But today is eighty-five days and I should fish the day
well. (The Old Man and the Sea)
