Monday, April 06, 2009

So Long Since I've Seen The Ocean

Many years ago some tourists and I set out in a boat with a glass bottom and sailed, if that word is applicable in the case of a motorboat, outwards into the sea until land was no longer visible. We landed on a sand bank, that is a sort of dune on the ocean floor that rises until it is just beneath the water's surface. If you stand on a sandbank's summit, it's like standing in shallow water.
I leaned back and fell and floated my ears submerged, my body a weightless piece of flotsam, and I heard nothing but the ocean and saw nothing but the sky.
The ocean is many miles and many years away now, but I think of it still and I when I do I miss its constant power, its endless roar. I miss the smell of salt that filled the coastal city we had set out from. I miss the sense that infinity is palpable and I miss how unavoidable it made my own insignificance.
Floating still in the middle of the sea you realise that this world is far far greater than anything you are, and just like that, you stop worrying.