The Ocean

As James Cameron has just touched the bottom of our deepest sea, we humans have killed another mystery in a world that was once full of mystery.  We, humans, seem to look so hard at the physical nature of our world, dividing and classifying everything we can observe, including ourselves.

It seems to me that with all of our "great" ability to explore, produce, extract and organize, we still have done little to improve our situation with greater happiness, compassion, or peace.  It has been said that all of our technology, industry, medical advances, entertainments, can be likened to giving salt water to a thirsty person, the appearance seems desirable but the effect is to make us more thirsty, and sick.

Because we know how far, how fast, or for how long, it does change the fact that we all thirst, hunger, love, hate, rejoice and suffer, live and die.

For each bit of "advancement", there is a price such that we have not seen much gain but rather a lot of frenzy and chaos.

Exploration, on a truly human scale, could do us some good, but we have mostly looked right past that.  

I stand on my own two feet, 

and move with the energy that is truly mine, 

I need no thing not offered, no thing that was not already here,

 and explore my own reasonable path,

 all that I need to discover is within my reach.

We have reached the tallest peak and the path is a littered highway, the peak a mound of meaningless markers and flags.

We have soared higher than the greatest birds and now our planet is surrounded by dead satellites, flotsam and jetsam.

As we now touch the deepest ocean floor, I wonder at what form of desecration will we put upon it.

I have explored the ocean, the deep and the shallow, the calm and the stormy.  I have got there by my own means, within the limitations of my human condition, by the energy that was offered.  My navigation was made by looking what at was around me, the face of the sky, the birds that flew by, the mood of the water, and by listening to the stories of those who went before me and who now have a quality of spirit like polished glass found by the sea.  I don't think that we will find anything at the bottom of the Mariana Trench that will be as useful to us as what we could get from just standing at the edge of the ocean and watching the waves roll in.

As waves upon the great ocean

we run our course

sometimes gentle, sometimes crashing

always mixing, reflecting, amplifying, canceling

but only for a time.
all end as they began 

Never alone, or separate, or individual

we are simply an observed series of moments and places of the great ocean

The surface of the great ocean has infinite numbers of waves

there are no limits to how many or for how long, and each has it's

own unique path

as some die others are born, it is impossible to count them

There is no need of fear, no ego, no individual need or desire

no wave is a thing unto itself, but just a quality of the great ocean

The end of a wave is not the end of the water that formed it

or the energy that shaped it

these things never belonged to the wave and were always a 

part of the great sea.