2015/01/11

Disappearing Ocean

My days in Zanzibar have unfolded like the rippling waves of the tide outside the little cabin where i´m currently housed.

Each morning I unbolt the door and am greeted by the Indian Ocean. The depth and range of turquoise, electric blue and emerald green is not possible to capture in words, save that it feels that each shade of this partition of the rainbow is represented here.

Everything in Zanzibar revolves around the sea, and for me this is somehow fitting because I feel like I had somehow forgotten the sea. Each morning the locals are at work in it, their relationship with it constant, ancient, filled with memory and knowledge. Somehow it feels like the ocean and the locals are co-dependent on one another. As if each somehow fulfills the purpose of the other.

One night the ocean receded and the tide disappeared so far you could only know it existed by the rumble far in the distance – like an army of tuba players playing an unending bass heavy, rumbling drone. The moon was full and I walked out what must have been a half kilometer. To start with over the sea-free, newly exposed sand, and then still further, with the ocean moored no deeper than my ankles as I walked out further.

The darkness had the quality of starlight, and the moon weaved patterns in the shallow seawater, glistening and disappearing like liquid diamonds. If it felt like another planet, it is because in a way it was another planet.

Though I was a shadowy scepter trespassing momentarily the ocean floor, it somehow chose not to make me feel a stranger. It´s in such moments I feel most with the world. It brought me back to the memory of my consciousness before my education began. Before the world was divided up in sections, boxes, categories. When there was a sense of indivisibility.

For a fleeting moment I could forget mind and glimpse a sense of being pre-fragmentation.

I believe this state of being is available within all of us. And if it can be lost, then why can it not again be found? There is a re-integration I seek. And even though what you see and experience can guide and inform you, ultimately that journey is an internal one. Beyond anything, this is what my journeys is about.

I believe darkness – what comes up inside us – can be conquered. But like any conquest the enemy must be faced. He has no discipline and comes at you with the power and tenacity of the fanatic – a hoard with a million eyes, and no fear of vengeance or repercussion. The subconscious is an ocean to render that of the real world´s waters just a teardrop. And it is one in which we must all find our nourishment, our food, our currency, our way of life.

So don´t reject it. Sail into it with the courage of the explorer, the hope of the fisherman, the conviction of the lunatic, the certainty of one who knows he must leave a land of drought. Then, one day, we will make our ancestors proud.