The Mother Sea
I highly recommend finding silence in a crackling, swirling sea.
Maybe you’ve jumped in a lake and floated on your back on a summer’s day. Maybe you’ve even stuck your head under water at the edge of a rushing river (be safe!).
But there’s nothing like the ever-mixing, stereo-surround, ASMR-inducing world of sound that is the mother-sea. The pop and tingle of billions of little pops and squeaks — like diving into a can of (salty) fizzy sparkling water — immersing you in a melodic, lo-fi groove of burps and flips via hi-fi channels. The beat can get to be a pounding tempo with cymbal crashes in high surf zones — or an easy bossa nova in the calm of the water column. You can turn your head left, right, up, down — and there’ll be symphonic gurgles all around.
And in this, I find silence.
Because the sea is loud, I am quiet. My touching and temperature senses are attuned to the liquid matter that’s swallowed me whole, and the steady stream of auditory stimuli floods my navigational senses into a heightened yet calm steady-state. I am cradled and held still while constantly sensing and moving and being moved.
Here, my mind is clear. Because my ears now see as crisply if not more so than my eyes — a shuffle of sand or a crunch of coral from a distance is no trouble to detect— part of my brain harmonizes with this singular rhythm. It switches to a level of autopilot we are forbidden from on land, where gravity always points us down, and our feet are our only modes of locomotion and reaction. Plugged into the sea and giving into the drift and current, we can float without aim, or follow towards with our ears (and four paddling limbs).
The rest of my brain is now empty. Scrubbed clean by the babble of these waters. I sense what I think is myself. I am more conscious of that warmth of life within me, and I’m further reminded by the occasional shudder when a colder current brushes by. But the corners and nooks of my memories and faculties, now and before, present and past, tomorrow and and the next — they are loosened by this active meditation.
Words and thoughts can be shaken loose in this silence. But you can’t dawdle on them for too long, because the navigational side of your brain keeps you at constant attention (the high-pitched whine of an approaching motorboat, hopefully traveling away from you). I am flushed clear because the gates of thought and sound are left wide open, unimpeding. In one ear, and out the other, as it were.
Where else but in the mother-sea can I find this wonderful silence?
