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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