Ocean

Marine blue. A wash of green. Navy at depth. Pacific blue off Kauai. Turquoise in Bahamian shallows, where tropical sun penetrates aquamarine. White sand below.

Ocean with galaxies of starfish, shivers of sharks, smacks of jellyfish. With animals as big as houses. With beings who are our kin, warm-blooded, intelligent, playful, zen. I had a dream once that I was a whale. I lay in a field with my pod, and we were not dying. You’d think whales on land would be in their death throes, but the field was irrelevant to our health or well-being. It was a dream.

What I remember from the dream was a state of non-thinking, non-analyzing, non-questioning. I lay in a field, as a whale, with my pod, simply being. I felt the sun. I knew my podmates. I was alive. I had no worry. I was like the TED speaker who had a stroke and lost language, whose mental chatter was silenced. Who in her wordless existence experienced life in the present. Feeling it. Absorbing it. Living it without judgment.

The ocean moves. It is fluid. It is never the same and always the same. On the scale of seconds, it is like snowflakes: each ripple is unique, no cubic inch is filled with the same light, the same particles, the same ctenophore larva, diatoms, coral spawn. On the scale of centuries, the ocean is constant, dependable: tides bulge and recede, hurricanes gather, currents flow like ancient rivers, waters evaporate, condense, rain down. Water always streams downward into the salty basins of the earth. Into the sea.

And blue. Always blue. The ocean is all of the prettiest blues. Aqueous sapphire. Liquid and light.

Photo credit: Jellyfish by domo k

For the month of April, I will be publishing a 10-minute free write each day, initiated by a prompt from my prompt box. Minimal editing. No story. Just thoughts spilling onto the page. Trying to get back into the writing habit.