As Kelley Swain says in her essay this issue, “The sea is more than she seems, and is not to be taken for granted, but, I believe, still is.”

In this season’s offerings of Sea Stories, meet some of these things too often taken for granted: simple things, like the gentle pull of waves on your body as you wade or swim on the beach; complex things, like the million-year-evolved navigational ability of a turtle or a salmon; things both simple and complex, like the curled intricacy of a sea creature’s shell. A person’s lifelong love for an old beach house; a marlin’s love—dare I say it? love, yes, love, no other human word for it than love—of its lifelong mate.

Of course, the sea and its inhabitants are only some of the things not to be taken for granted. Human things, too: like your brother, his sanity, your own courage; the death of a child, perhaps made known to us by a few broken teeth a century old; a memory of a friend.

All these beings and realities are strong, it’s true, and in their own ways powerful beyond reckoning; but at the same time they are all delicate, subject to damage and destruction at a moment’s notice, whether by a storm’s wild fury or the subtle unseen knife of a fishing hook’s metal; by an ignorant foot falling on a fragile shell on a beach, or by the planned, rationalized, monstrous machinery of a money-hungry capitalist industry decimating the seas from floor to ceiling.

In these pages, you’re invited to take a simple yet important step, a step simultaneously toward religion and toward revolution: Pay attention to these things. Don’t take them for granted. Recognize them with delight, perhaps, like an old beloved face you haven’t seen in a long time; or gaze on them for the first time, like a shining new-born baby. Keep your eyes open, even when what you are looking at fades into mystery; don’t turn away, even when the shadow of looming, unstoppable danger falls. Keep looking, in joy and in hurt, and don’t take these things for granted.

SPH


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