Salt and Sugar Musings on Okaloosa Island

Erasing the Space Between Thought and Being

Please enjoy these captured flashes of sight and sound from Okaloosa Island taken last week:

I was born with a brain that rarely shuts up, and this mental susurrus cuts deeply sometimes. Yet I can always find respite in the unruly rhythm of the ocean. It’s too loud to ignore or overcome. Its vast wildness must be heeded. Duly humbled, I readily surrender my tangled thoughts to the wholeness of the sea.

Perhaps this heron senses the immense totality, too? The complete creature breathing over Earth in soft curls of foam and salty spray . . .

The sea breezes soothe my internal head gale with a relentless lullaby of waves, reminding me:

I’m just another sand speck on the shoreline of time, a brief bonding of matter and thought that will be pounded into oblivion in a temporal gust one day.

Wandering beside the waves allows me to feel the edges of my own insignificant parameters. How could I not next to a fiercely fluid body that envelops 71 percent of our planet? Sometimes, with continents and capitols stuck in the craw of my consciousness, I forget the blue side of Earth where there’s barely any dry dirt visible from space. Yet the Ocean rolls in sapphire solitude while we stick things clamor over landmasses.

Know your smallness. I think it’s the only way for us to reconnect with everything else. Yet sometimes, we get so bogged down in our own unique desires and dreams, desperate to leave some kind of mark that time won’t take away . . .

Our fate was always set for ultimate erasure. Still, I naively wish it was possible for humanity to understand itself better first. Terribly trite, but I make no apologies for that starry-eyed girl who grew up on Star Trek, and once believed.

Did you know that if the space between the atoms in every human body was erased, you could shrink our entire species down to the volume of a sugar cube? All our genetic data, tragedies, and triumphs compressed into a tiny object that rests easily in the palm of a hand.

Would that inescapable closeness link all our minds in some grand heaven or hell? I wonder. Some shimmering horizons seem almost impossible to imagine anymore . . .

What if to be human, a conscious being, is to become in some ways unshareable? Set apart, each thought a million light years from every truly fathoming the deepest core of another’s heart? Maybe so. But I reject those bonds and bounds! And I will leave this last golden sun song from my time in Okaloosa with you, a small offering from my own shattered wishes.

Sources:

“Just how Big is the Ocean?” Smithsonian Natural History Museum. ocean.si.edu.

https://ocean.si.edu/planet-ocean/seafloor/just-how-big-ocean

“A Different View of Earth.” Smithsonian Natural History Museum. ocean.si.edu.

https://ocean.si.edu/planet-ocean/different-view-earth

Sundermier, Ali. (30 August 2016) “You Could Fit The Entire Human Race Into A Sugar Cube — And 13 Other Facts To Put The Universe Into Perspective.” iflscience.com

https://www.iflscience.com/you-could-fit-the-entire-human-race-into-a-sugar-cube-and-13-other-facts-to-put-the-universe-into-perspective-37650