Tuesday, May 13, 2014

The Homecoming


Corals spread wide like open fans of lace, purple and red anemones unfold like flowers, reaching with delicate tentacles towards the dancing sun’s rays that filter down from above. And through these watery gardens swim schools of blue and yellow fish like flights of tropical birds. Long fronds of sea plants wave gracefully to the half-silent, half-forgotten echoes of sea shells: the music of the deeps… and I float between them, adrift from the world of the land, from the breathing of air, from the heavy and difficult walking on unfamiliar legs, from earthbound cares and sorrows.

Here, far beneath the surface waves, beneath the tug and turmoil of the world above, is where I was born. I do not know, cannot remember, the first moment of my existence. Perhaps my becoming was a gradual thing. What I do remember is a first awareness, a consciousness of my being. Perhaps I was created by an unknown other, or perhaps, in that new awareness, I created myself. I only remember those distant times as times of drift and darkness. Then later, much later, an emergence of a lesser dark as, still drifting, I rose slowly from the deeps.

For millions of years my body drifted. The seas around me changed, became less barren, were now sown with new growth: gardens and forests of sea plants that waved gracefully with the currents, amphora-shaped sponges that among the age-old corals clamped fast to their rocks in a world of muffled light and silence. Now the subtly-changing song of the sea shells tells me that I have reached another ocean, and I drift over gardens of flowers that are really animals: delicate sea lilies that turn their tentacles to the winds of this watery underworld, as flowers turn towards the sun in the world above.

This is my world: a world inhabited by water spirits and nymphs, sirens and sea maids: beings invisible to those of the land, as invisible to them as the pathways we travel across these great oceans, drifting in a deep sea dream of endless blue currents. I drift with them; am myself one of them, ever drifting in this world of blue silence beneath the waves. We never leave the sea, would never wish to, for the sea does not experience departures, only returns. Whether you believe in my existence, whether you believe or not in my slim and spectral sea maid body, one day you also will return, for our mother ocean is home to us all. And I and the others of my kind will be waiting to welcome you home.


10 comments:

  1. This is most beautiful....deeply spiritual and speaks to my soul...you are such a poetic spirit..words profound and bewildering...pure magic!!
    Beautiful my friend...
    Victoria

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    1. Dearest Victoria.. your generous words mean so much to me, and speak of your own generous spirit. We (people generally) speak to each other, and we communicate what we wish to. But I think that it is when spirits speak to each other that the magic happens ...... Thank you so much.

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  2. Na dit lezen, kijk ik naar buiten en zie een prachtige lucht. Kleuren die alleen bestaan in onze gedachten, onwerkelijk roze, donzig grijs, waterblauw en flarden goud. Poederige tinten die zo passen bij jouw mooie schrijven...♥

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  3. Hey lieverd, dat is wel zo mooi wat je schrijft.... jouw waterblauw ..roze ... grijs... en flarden goud.... de bespiegelingen van de elementen waarin wij ons thuis weten.....

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  4. En wat ik nog vergeet: wat een prachtig schilderij. Complimenten aan David!

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  5. This is a beautifully creative and poetic journey, a journey through water. There are two things necessary for life to manifest into form. One is fire. The other is water. Emma wrote, "...for the sea does not experience departures, only returns..." and this is so for we never leave the mother ocean as she is in our bodies as the water coursing throughout our limbs and organs as blood and fluid. We carry her with us or perhaps as part of us as a grand legacy of life sustained and nurtured by this primordial element. David's painting is intriguing and masterful in depicting the mysterious blending of human forms and what appears to be coral.

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    1. Thank you, Joseph - yes, our connections with (and to) water echo in many things - including our amphibious existence during our first nine months of life! All these things are our legacy, as you say.

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    2. Thank you, Joseph. Yes, my painting is indeed based upon a photo which I took off the coast of a remote region in northwest Australia, and show the large coralheads exposed at low tide. The tidal difference at this particular spot is one of the largest in the world, and whole reefs become visible, just as you see here. My imagination did the rest!

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