THE SEA IN WINTER

When anxious, uneasy and bad thoughts come, I go to the sea, and the sea drowns them out with its great wide sounds, cleanses me with its noise, and imposes a rhythm upon everything in me that is bewildered and confused.

Rilke

Here on the coast of South Carolina, where my wife and I have come for the winter, I devote much of my time to walking the magnificent beaches that define this part of the Atlantic coastline.  Gone are the sunbathers of summer, with their beach chairs, their overloaded coolers, and their colorful umbrellas.  This is now a place where one can find solitude, a place where memory deepens, a place where we can seemingly reenter the womb of nature from whence we began our journey.

From the inception of human thought, mankind has felt a special connection with the sea.  There is something about its rhythm and constancy that is both cleansing and reassuring.  When we stand at the sea's edge looking into infinity, we know in our hearts that we are part of something much grander and more complex than our individual, day-to-day lives.  We hear the surf rise and fall; we watch the tide deposit its gifts and then reclaim them; we see the light rise, then fall, only to rise again — and, like the light, we are born again into each new moment.  Perhaps it was best said by Pablo Neruda in the poem quoted at the end of this piece:  "Every day on the balcony of the sea, wings open, fire is born, and everything is blue again like morning."

While I often walk these beaches with my wife and my Zen master, Derry, I also spend a great deal of time walking alone.  Some might find this a lonely enterprise, but I do not.  Indeed, I find myself in complete agreement with that fine writer and lover of the sea, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, who once said:

The loneliness you get by the sea is personal and alive.  It doesn't subdue you and make you feel abject.  It's a simulating loneliness.

Rilke is so right about the effects the sea on the human spirit.  The "great wide sounds" of the ocean drown out the "anxious, uneasy and bad thoughts," and "impose a rhythm upon everything . . . that is bewildered and confused."   When the rhythm is restored to our lives, we begin to hear the music again — and with the music comes the dance.

Set forth below are a few photos that I have taken during my walks of the past couple of days.  I have also chosen some insightful comments from others on the mystical connection between mankind and the sea.  Enjoy.

The three great elemental sounds in nature are the sound of rain, the sound of wind in a primeval wood, and the sound of outer ocean on a beach.

Henry Beston

The sea does not reward those who are too anxious, too greedy, or too impatient.  One should lie empty, open, choiceless as a beach — waiting for a gift from the sea.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Every time we walk along a beach, some ancient urge disturbs us so that we find ourselves shedding shoes and garments or scavenging among seaweed and whitened timbers like the homesick refugees of a long war.

Loren Eisley

. . . for whatever we lose (like a you or a me), it's always ourselves we find in the sea.

E.E.  Cummings 

The cure for anything is salt water — sweat, tears, or the sea.

Isak Dinesen

I find myself at the extremity of a long beach.  How gladly does the spirit leap forth, and suddenly enlarge its sense of being to the full extent of the broad, blue, sunny deep!

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Why to we love the sea?  It is because it has some potent power to make us think things we like to think.

Robert Henri

Sit in reverie and watch the changing color of the waves that break upon the idle seashore of the mind.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The sea, once it casts its spell, holds one in its net of wonder forever.

Jacques Cousteau




In every curving beach, in every grain of sand, there is the story of the earth.


Rachel Carson


Live in the sunshine, swim the sea, drink the wild air.


Emerson

My Wife, Margaret, and the Zen Master at Play

I really don't know why it is that all of us are so committed to the sea, except I think it's because, in addition to the fact that the sea changes, and light changes, and ships change, it's because we all came from the sea.  And it is an interesting biological fact that all of us have in our veins the exact same percentage of salt in our blood that exists in the ocean, and, therefore, we have salt in our blood, in our sweat, in our tears.  

We are tied to the ocean.  And when we go back to the sea — whether it is to sail or to watch it — we are going back from whence we came.

John F. Kennedy
  
                                                               

It Is Born

                                          Here I came to the very edge

                                          where nothing at all needs saying,

                                          everything is absorbed through weather and sea,

                                          and the moon swam back,

                                          its rays all silvered,

                                          and time and again the darkness would be broken

                                          by the crash of a wave,

                                          and every day on the balcony of the sea, 

                                          wings open, fire is born,

                                          and everything is blue again like morning.

Pablo Neruda

Derry