The Sea

I reside deep in the Kyrgyz mountains, far from the sea. In fact, I have heard that none of the water in Kyrgyzstan even ends up draining into any ocean; every drop of rain that falls or snowflake that melts there stays contained in the highland basins of Central Asia. That is how distant the sea is from the Kyrgyz experience. The moon seems closer and more real to me, though it is not a part of this planet, because I see it almost every night, whereas I feel the sea almost does not exist when I gaze out into the Kyrgyz sky.

This week I am staying meters away from the sea. I hear its rhythmic song as I open my hotel room window and observe the gulls diving across the water in search of food. The Kyrgyz mountains are impressive and I am in awe of their imposing heights, yet the sea is a greater source of mystery as one can trace the point where a mountain touches the sky, but the depth of the ocean cannot ever be perceived from any vantage point, especially from the shore. No wonder tales of mermaids and sea monsters have inhabited the human imagination for so long. Those sorts of creatures are what we humans conjure up when we cannot observe what exists deep beyond our sight.

It is also the expanse and magnitude of the sea that confounds us: it is as close to infinity as we can experience on this planet as the endless heavens are really beyond our earthly capacity to experience and comprehend. When I stand on the shore, I am overwhelmed and feel hopelessly small when facing the largest and greatest feature of our planet as nothing is more immense than the enormous mass of ocean that covers this earth. Each wave that rolls upon the sand is a child of the wave that preceded it and is related to all the ancestors that have rolled upon the land in the billions of years prior to when any of us were here. This cycle of wave after wave has never stopped, has never ceased. Each wave is like a grain in an almost infinite hourglass that measures time almost endlessly. It is a reminder that the sea is the mother of almost everything that exists here on our planet.

Walking along the ocean and inhaling the salty, thick, and heavy air is the greatest joy I experience away from the thin atmosphere of the mountains. But, I will only be able to enjoy a few more days of this luxury before I return to the heights and to life in the giant yellow spaceship in which I live. Sea and sky, earth and mountain, air and water, sun and moon--the elements of life, so seldom do I consider them, yet each day they affect me in ways I do not always comprehend. Before I leave the sea, I will let the freezing salt water wash over my feet, sand between my toes, to remind me of the place in the great infinity in which I've had the good fortune to reside.