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Tell me you wouldn't trade in your shoes for bare feet at the beach and sand in your pocket. Tell me you wouldn't want to be at the ocean on any old day of the week. Tell me this and I would not believe you because I love the ocean. I miss it dearly as someone who is landlocked in the Midwest. And I can't quite fathom not loving the ocean, being indifferent to it - Well, it's nice but...
Because with ocean comes cloud. With water and the ever-reaching expanse of it comes sky, perspective, clouds and birds, height and depth. Instead of worrying about my little life I watch a bird chase for food and wonder why he has to chase for food, and that is refreshing. It's a chance to look out over a landscape and take in something much bigger than myself - take in air rolled in salt, ships the size of a stick, endless grains of sand and shell...the list goes on.
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I'm traveling soon, and I was traveling when I took these photos. Something about getting on a plane and jetting across miles of land feels like stepping into an ocean for me. My singular becomes plural. I take part in something much bigger than myself as I see a different swath of sky and step onto a different patch of earth.
And I look around so much more when I'm traveling. Sometimes I feel like it's all an effort to ground myself in the present moment, my gaze a line and my eyes an anchor into the objects and people that surround me so I can stand a little longer, wait for the train a little longer, know where I am and trust where I am going a little longer.
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I draw inwards, too, when I travel, reserving my energy for the friends I'm going to meet, the strangers I'm going to pass by on the train. I draw inwards to become a part of the crowd - to not stick out.
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And whether I stick out or not doesn't really matter. What matters is the adventure. The sense of new. And the sense of the familiar in the new. How home can be found anywhere. How home is more than a place.
An offering, then, to you as you read to step out into your place, whether for travel or for the sake of seeing more of where you live. An offering to know your place and cozy up to it, or to stick out and surrender to sea and cloud.
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Pablo Neruda wrote in his poem The Sea: "I need an ocean to teach me: whatever it is that I learn - music or consciousness, the single wave in the sea, the abyss of my being, the guttural rasp of my voice, or the blazing presumption of fishes and navies - so much is certain: even in sleep, as if by the trick of a magnet, I spin on the circle of wave upon wave of the sea, the sea's university... And all that I learn is remembered. It is air, it is sand, it is water, the interminable wind... and I cling with the whole of my being to what is purest in movement."
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He says it much better than I can, at the moment, and ever will.
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