The Ocean: Facing Death

The ocean lives for us as a metaphor; we are too small, too closely tied to a single time and place, to truly grasp the ocean.

We clutch at its edges, we personify and tame it, in our minds; we live as toddlers in the shallow, frothy, sand-filled ripples, ignoring the breakers, ignoring the swells, ignoring the deep, dark, brooding depths with currents unseen.

Were we to truly grasp the immensity of the ocean, its implacability, the invisibility to it of the brief, warm, flickering life forms upon the shore, were we to understand our true place in the scheme of things - we would be too afraid ever to go to the beach.

After a few still days, the ocean lies flat, shimmering like a lake, the tiniest flop of wavelets barely stirring the sand. No hint, then, of the post-storm swells, the pounding, vicious, tearing forces which strip the beach of its golden sand, leaving it bleak, bereft, rocky and steep. How could one imagine it, who has seen only the soft and sunny sea?

How can one forget it, who has once been torn and riven, and has clung, barely alive, to the rocks, praying only that if death comes, it is quick and merciful? Welcoming the possibility of death, with its promise of relief ...

Now the one who has lived his whole life in the sun, and the one who has stared Death in the face look at one another across a chasm of misunderstanding. How can the other not see the ocean as I do?

It only takes one vision of the mighty Beast to throw forever a shadow on the shining sea.

And yet, even with Death in its breast, the ocean beguiles, seduces.

Crystal greens and evening blues reach deep into my soul, and play quivering melodies on my heart strings. A slow set of swells lifts the salt water in my body to a breathless peak of anticipation. A lull, a higher peak, another breathless lull, and then the third wave rises up, dark blue-green, up beyond the point of no return, thinning ... stretching ... rising ... bending ever so slowly ... and with a delightful curling motion breaks orgasmically into roiling froth, leaving behind a trail of dimpling reminders of my ragged sighing release.

I feel it deep, beneath my tongue, below my ribs, the eternal connection that makes this body one with all the physical world, this soul one with all Spirit, this mind an irrelevant chirping thing perched on the top of a mountain it cannot comprehend.

It is not enough to deny Death, like children playing on the sand. It is not enough to fear Death, as one who cannot face the shore at all. It is not enough to long for Death as a release from pain and fear and sorrow. One must expand beyond Death, embrace life to the extent that Death becomes irrelevant, a part of something greater - an End, a Beginning, but also an eternal Middle. Until one can be dying in every moment, one cannot truly live.

My body does not want to die; that is as it should be. My mind cannot contemplate Death, but believes it can. Only my soul, in the depths of my guts and with one foot through the door into the Well of Souls, only my soul can be with Death,for it holds Life and Death as one ecstatic experience, eternally, unmovingly, suspended outside Space and Time, quivering motionlessly.

Popping in and out of human awareness is a form of hide-and-seek for the soul. Only by forgetting, deliberately blinding itself, can it know the glory of discovery, and revel in the beauty and ecstasy of being neither alive nor dead.

Images: JFord, Essjay