SOMETHING I FORGOT TO READ

The view from Saturday's New Year, New Moon Nature Meditation in Manhattan Beach.

I meant to read this at our ocean meditation, but somehow it got lost in the beauty and spontaneity of the moment.  I think it so captures the essence of one of the many gifts the sea gives to those who go and sit with her.

THE SEA

I need the sea because it teaches me,

I don’t know if I learn music or awareness,

if it’s a single wave or its vast existence,

or only its harsh voice or its shining

suggestion of fishes and ships.

The fact is that until I fall asleep,

in some magnetic way I move in

the university of the waves.

It’s not simply the shells crunched

as if some shivering planet

were giving signs of its gradual death;

no, I reconstruct the day out of a fragment,

the stalactite from a sliver of salt,

and the great god out of a spoonful.

What it taught me before, I keep. It’s air

ceaseless wind, water and sand.

It seems a small thing for a young man,

to have come here to live with his own fire;

nevertheless, the pulse that rose

and fell in its abyss,

the cracking of the blue cold,

the gradual wearing away of the star,

the soft unfolding of the wave

squandering snow with its foam,

the quiet power out there, sure

as a stone shrine in the depths,

replaced my world in which were growing

stubborn sorrow, gathering oblivion,

and my life changed suddenly:

as I became part of its pure movement.

- Pablo Neruda, On the Blue Shore of Silence