Sea-lust has been with me all of my life. As a skinny shivery child, turned blue while my mother taught swimming at Middleton Beach, frantically windmilling to shore when the shark siren sounded; as a teenager suspended above the sea-grass and limestone reef every weekend on the west coast; as an adult rocked unquietly into deep sleep on a yacht; fishing, working in the marina, diving for crabs; surfing the cold Southern Ocean; mesmerised by the glide of ocean dwelling albatross running before sea-storms in swell as high as a six-storey building - lost in its vastness.
You can’t spend that much time with the sea and not witness its dark side. Eventually it will reveal all of itself - it will pour into you and it will reveal you too.
When you are cursed or gifted with a soul that has no defence against the realised world; when there is no division between you and everything else, you feel too much. When you stand on the edge of the sea your eyes drink in its thrown-wide expanse, the whole ocean of clear cold pours into your heart. With your soul thus possessed there is no place to hide. The night-sea swells in each quiet space. It whispers the truth, whether you want to hear it or not.
You can long for it, be angry with it, be afraid. It is of no use. The sea is relentlessly wounded - pushed and thrown - like you, changed by everything, by nothing.
Be fluid, forgive, thrown together and let it feel you.
image: small oil study for thesis
