el mar y la alma

attention - poetry / music / philosophy warning - continue reading at your own peril:

karnivool - salva (prog-rock with bagpipes at the end - so very fitting for galicia) - an excerpt from the lyrics:

there ain’t no place i’d rather be
but i’ve gotta go, i’ve gotta run away
i carry my heart down to the sea
and let the salt dissolve it

i guess, being at the ocean does something to us (at least to me). or is it because i am nearing the end of my long walk across from the moiuntains to the sea? i am in a moody mood today. the sky is grey, outside and also inside my head.

looking out over the ocean, i think about metaphors. and poetry. and music.

about how the state of the ocean can be used to describe my own mind and soul. the sea is never still for long. waves rise, dissolve, return. no wave is ever quite the same as the one before it. each one emerges, takes shape for a fleeting moment, then disappears back into the whole. constant movement. constant transformation. here for an instant, then gone.

a wave is not something separate. not truly. a wave is not an independent thing (or being) moving across the water. it is the water. it is the ocean expressing itself in a particular form. the deep currents, distant winds, gravity, the moon, invisible forces beneath the surface shape its movement long before it appears. todo está interconectado. everything is connected.

the wave exists because the ocean exists. neither is complete without the other. what appears separate is only a temporary distinction drawn by perception. a name we have given to it. a definition or boundary imposed on something that never needed one for itself. to just be.

perhaps the same is true of us.

i call myself ‘i’ as though i am a fixed thing (or being), an isolated unchanging entity moving through the world. but maybe i am more like a wave, formed by countless forces. ancestors, parents, family, friends, experiences, interpretations, impressions, memory, circumstance, chance encounters, culture, love, grief, desire. a changing pattern emerging from something far larger than myself.

the deeper you go into the ocean, the more mystery there is. the closer you get to these forces.

sunlight reaches only so far. beneath it lies darkness. silence. immense pressure, forces. entire worlds hidden from view. strange forms of life that seem impossible from the surface. it can feel terrifying to imagine what waits below. what lurks in those depths? where does it end? is there even a bottom? how is it all connected?

the only way to know is to descend and have a look. beneath the familiar stories you tell yourself, beneath identity, ambition, fear, and memory, there are deeper waters. places rarely visited. places that cannot be understood from a distance. some parts of ourselves remain unexplored not because they are inaccessible, but because we hesitate to enter the darkness. because we fear what we may find.

while thinking about that, i might as well enjoy the view. and the light - even though sparse today. these dark extremes maybe also contain true wonders. the dark only exists as a contrast to the light, i think.

watch the sun dissolve into the horizon. watch the sky surrender its colors to the evening. until there is only blue(s)(&jazz), then grey, then black. dark again. listen to the rhythm of the waves arriving and departing, without resistance, without asking to be anything other than what they are.

and when the sea grows calm, when the surface becomes almost motionless (though it never truly does), i think:

can i let go of the restless urge to solve every problem? can i stop wrestling with questions that exist only because i have judged reality a certain way? after all, problems are only problems because i have decided they should not be as they are.

can i stop the constant striving? can i simply be?

for a moment, or one moment after the other, without anxiety. without desire. without needing the next answer, the next achievement, the next version of myself. i already am, constantly shifting, constantly changing, morphing from moment to moment. flowing.

just this. the sound of water. the fading light. the breath moving in and out.

tranquility. presence. attention. flow. something close to transcendence.

i am a wave. then i soften. then i dissolve. then i return. from the same ocean, another wave emerges. i am. i wanna be.