The Moods of the Sea

There’s something magical about the moods of the sea. Calm waves gently lapping on the shore, bringing forth tiny secrets from the vast depths that lay behind them.

Little shells line the beach marking the edge of yesterday’s tide, once homes to the critters hiding below, they now live their second life on land, perhaps plucked from the sands by a delighted child.

Conversely, the ocean can be violent. Tsunamis and storms, the riptides below. It is both a place of birth and beauty and a place of death and destruction. We humans are drawn to its power. We have tried to understand and conquer it since the dawn of time but it is a force unto its own, a mysteriously relatable universe filled with its own miniature worlds all subject to the unforgiving rules of Mother Nature.

Yesterday we visited the ocean, basked in awe at its enormity, breathed it’s salty air into our lungs and stood grateful for the opportunity to witness and contemplate its power, grateful for the opportunity to be a tiny part of this incredible world, with all its complications and sadness, beauty and wonder.

We considered how everything that ever was and ever will be, the good, the bad and the mundane, exists in one way or another right here, right around us, right now. We are all bathing in the infinite existence of everything, where time in its linear form only matters when we allow it the space in our minds and hearts to do so.

That tiny bird scratching for seeds in the car park, the game you played with your children, the business meeting that never seems to end, the heartbreak of losing someone you loved. These moments are all as important as each other, for different reasons and in different ways.

Your emotions, your experiences, they all contributed to who you are right now. In every grounded instance we can choose which thought, feeling or experience we want to hold onto, which we would rather learn to let go of. Even when our memory only allows an experience to exist for a fleeting amount of time, we can feel the power of that moment while we are in it, notice it, notice the emotion we have and sit with it.

Yesterday we visited the ocean, I only had a moment there, a moment for me to sit in its intensity, snap a few pictures and carry on with our day. And while Kate set off to laugh with friends and plod along a muddied track atop the oldest horse in the world, I held onto that moment by the ocean. I clung to it’s fleeting yet precious reminder of how lucky I am to still exist in this world, to feel the joy and the sorrow, for whatever time I have left, in whatever moods, memories and moments present themselves, I am grateful to have experienced life.

– Catherine