me and the sea

I spend hours each day at the sea. We have become intimate friends. I love seeing it each morning and looking around and deciding what mood it is in today. Tide in? Tide out? Waves? Flat and still like a lake? Clouds over it? Moon rise? Sunrise? Windy? Fishermen out? Shimmering, glittering, glimmering, sparkling? Grey, green, white, brown, blue shade? Flying fish? Also the shoreline changes so much each time as it curves around, either inviting you to walk along the rocky coastline or it disappears and you need to walk on the narrow dirt path to the side.

For the past couple of days the sea has been so wild and windy with huge waves. I had never seen it like that before. It happens during the monsoon season. It was so powerful, crashing on the shore. I just sat for hours watching it and wondering what it was all about, other than the full moons' effect. The Balinese relate to the sea as the Great Purifier. It is there that the crematory ashes are thrown.  And as I walk along the shore and see all of the plastic and rubbish that is washed ashore each day, I wonder what kind of purifier it really is. Even with the publicity of "bali clean and green" and "keep bali clean" etc, habit is habit and people still throw their rubbish into the sea. I even watched as one of the fishermen cleaned up the area around his boat on shore, since the sea was too rough to go out fishing, and threw it all into the sea. I couldn't believe it. Didn't he know the tide would just bring it all back to shore in a few minutes or hours?  Maybe it wouldn't end up in front of his boat, but rather some 50 meters further down the shore but why back to the sea??

And then this morning, when I came to the sea, I sensed something different. Other than it being mainly black sand instead of rocks, there was something else that I couldn't quite put my finger on. I enjoyed the soft sand, a luxury, since it is usually so rocky. It was easier to hoop, and doing my exercises on the large shaded sandy areas. And while I was doing that, and just kind of looking out at the crashing waves and wondering what it was all about, I noticed that our dog had dug a deep hole in the sand. He too was happy to have sand! And as I walked past the hole I realized that he had dug so deep that he had hit big stones.

It was then that the puzzle pieces started to fit together. I realized that it wasn't that all the stones had been washed to sea, as I had assumed. But rather that the sea had brought ashore tons of sand that covered all of the rocks! As I walked along the shore I realized that there wasn't a single bit of rubbish to be seen. I knew no one could have cleaned the entire coastline, and that this rare virgin looking sea was what the Balinese were referring to as the great purifier. I am still not sure whether it just took all of the rubbish (tons of plastic snack wrappers, flip flops, broken bits of plastic and metal) and just swept it out to sea, or whether it just buried it all underneath the sand.  In any case, the water was perfectly clear, after days of it being thickish, and the shore was its' natural self, and I too became a believer that the sea is the great purifier…even though I know there is a pile of plastic in the sea somewhere the size of the state of texas and a few miles deep! It is easy to stay naïve and believe that everything really is in harmony and mother nature is just churning her cycle of creation, preservation and destruction and we don't really need to get all up in arms about it. Yes, the coral is faded and disappearing, as are the beautiful colorful fish, and animals are chocking on plastic bags and the water is being tested as very polluted in the world. But still the thought crosses my mind that maybe it is all just preparing for the next stage of our lives…? That maybe the sea is like a great mother that knows that her children are still small and don't understand anything and keep throwing their candy wrappers on the ground instead of the garbage bin.  And she patiently picks them up and throws them away for them, until they grow up and understand the importance of taking responsibility for their actions (which is the stage we seem to be entering now? Puberty? )

Meanwhile, I shall see what new lessons and thoughts and scenery it gifts me with tomorrow morning….