WE LIVE, M. and I, about ten feet from the water. When there is a storm and the wind pushes toward us from the southeast we live about a foot from the water. It sings all day long and all night as well, never the same music. Wind, temperature, where the tide is, how the moon is tugging or shoving—each of these makes a difference. The tide going out sounds harsher than the voice of its rising, what seems like a disinclination to leave growls in it, with the sound of dark, thick-stringed instruments. Coming in, it is more playful. Every day my early morning walk along the water grants me a second waking. My feet are nimble, now my ears wake, and give thanks for the ocean’s song. This enormity, this cauldron of changing greens and blues, is the great palace of the earth. Everything is in it—monsters, devils, jewels, swimming angels, soft-eyed mammals that unhesitatingly exchange looks with us as we stand on the shore; also, sunk with some ship or during off-loading, artifacts of past decades or centuries; also the outpourings of fire under water, the lava trails; and kelp fields, coral shelves, and so many other secrets—the remembered and faithfully repeated recitations of the whales, the language of dolphins—and the multitude itself, the numbers and the kinds of shark, seal, worm, vegetations, and fish: cod, haddock, swordfish, hake, also the lavender sculpin, the chisel-mouth, the goldeye, the puffer, the tripletail, the stargazing minnow. How can we not know that, already, we live in paradise?
~ Mary Oliver, Long Life: Essays and Other Writings
Credits: Photograph – Ridiculously Photogenic Chewbacca
I have never been an ocean person. Give me the susurrous of the wind in the pines any day.
I grew up in pines. I have spent the last few decades around oceans and find I cannot be far from water any longer.
“Jaws” ruint me.
beautiful…
Everyone has to live somewhere. Some are just luckier than others.
(Note to self: Man sitting in 60 F temps. Our sage.)
Good question, that …
I think that there are many “paradises” in this world. I’ve lived in several.
Me too Maralee.
Paradise can be anywhere…we just need to open our eyes and our hearts to what is already here…that is what I believe.
I agree Carol.
And I’m pretty sure Mary Oliver believes that too… 🙂
The sea is a miracle unto itself. So are the stars and all of nature. Yes, we do live in a paradise if we would just leave it be.
Yes…..
we just need to be present. fully.
We do, my friend. We do.
We do. We do!