Hey I hope you’re enjoying my journey through Europe so far! In my last post I listed out 14 regrets or learnings should I say, that I came away with from my European holiday in 2023. I’m sure many travellers out there have experienced some of these which went from making an active effort to speak the local language, ‘use spot rates, not futures contracts’, and one of the biggest tips I can give anyone – smile! If you resonate with any of these points, do let me know. You can comment down below or leave me a mesage, I’m always happy to hear from my dear readers 🙂
In this post I talk about what it was like being in the sea and my genuine belief that the sea has a soul and a spirit. It is a biological organism at the end of the day. This changed my perception of nature and how I saw myself in this world. I hope you find this insightful and if you do I would be forever grateful if you could please share this blog with your friends and family! Don’t forget to subscribe too using the short form on the right hand side so that you get first hand email alerts to new posts!
The Soul and Spirit of the Sea
Jus relax, man!
I’m barely ten yards from the shore, but the sea is choppy. The water is up to my waist. As Scoty sits down, the water is up to his neck.
“Take a dip and chill,” he says. “It won’t go over your head.”
“Yo man, shit is touching my legs,” I say.
“Seaweed, man!” Sargassum! It’s a problem we workin’ on. Just come in.”
Scoty reaches down and grabs a handful of whatever sargassum is and slings it away from me – apparently the fact that it’s now eight feet away is supposed to make me comfortable. I take a deep breath, and I sit. The sea is almost translucent, and as warm as bathwater. The waves are knocking and jolting and tossing me around.
“Don’t fight it, man,” Scoty says, “It’s a flow. It’ll carry yuh out, but it’ll bring you back.”
Scoty is calmly floating in complete harmony with the rhythm of the sea, and I’m hanging around like a monkey fuckin’ a football. And while I never got fully comfortable, I began to understand the human relationship with the ocean.
Reconnectin’ and limin’.
The ebb and flow of the tide is the heartbeat of the planet. When they sit in the ocean all day, they are tuning themselves in to the frequency of the earth. This alignment, to Scoty, was the highest human experience. When he spends time with anyone he loves, he wants to spend it in the ocean – surfing, fishing, boating, water-skiing, swimming, reconnectin’, and limin’.
- Will Smith, “Will”, Hardcover Page 371.
I read this part in Will Smith’s memoir back in January 2023 I think and at the time whilst I found it very interesting and insightful to read, I’d be lying if I said I really understood or connected with it.
Although the memoir is classed as non-fiction and all the events are true, I still read them in a way that feels like fiction. It feels like a story even though I recognise that this is someone’s life’s experiences I can’t fully connect to what they’re saying because I haven’t really experienced the same depth of emotion and understanding towards the experience.
So on reading this, whilst I will say that it was beautifully written, it felt like reading a poem. Something that is nice to read, but in all honesty I didn’t have any shared experience or connection with. Until now.
It was in the low 30’s in Croatia when I was there. It was so sunny, the sun was so energising and the seas were so calm. I remember going to my first beach on this holiday with the group of friends I’d made at the Hostel in Trogir.
The Hostel was itself a small hostel. It had previously been a printing shop which had been converted. So it was very niche with basic facilities but so warm and cosy to live so close with other groups of people, eating and talking at the same dining table like in a shared house.
Actually, this was way better than a shared house. I’d lived in many whilst in London but had no prior experience similar to this. There was a kitchen, a shared communal area and a dining table. And I remember after the beach day, we went to a supermarket to buy a bunch of vegetables, rice and meatballs so that we could all cook dinner together. This was such an amazing experience. I don’t even do that with my own family.
At the beach, it was a pebbly beach with no sand but there was a nice bar, some lounges which went over the shore. And the shore was initially quite shallow before it got more deep. I can swim but I had never been in the sea before and I was a little nervous at first when I got in because I didn’t know what to expect and it was just the unknown at that point.
On stepping in and getting the water up to my waist the coolness and freshness of the water was so reassuring and relaxing. I could feel the soft waves which became quite hypnotising to me. My friends helped me to build my confidence and trust that she will take care of you.
The sea around Croatia now has a lot of salt compared to the English Channel or the Hudson river. This is as a result of climate change. But what it does mean is that it’s so easy to float and buoyancy is impeccably easy. Because I became relaxed, my first step was to just lie back on the water looking up.
I realised and it became so evident and obvious to me that the more you relax and trust in her, the easier it will become for you to see her wonders. The more you panic, the stiffer your body becomes and she doesn’t know what to do with you, which makes everything so much more difficult.
I just closed my eyes, took a deep breath initially and just dropped back. I was immediately floating and lifted up. It was like I fell asleep but I was floating and I could feel the waves and the tides pushing me back and forth. My friends were keeping watch but they didn’t lay a hand on me to support me. The sea, she took care of that.
We then did some swimming underwater and used some phones to take photos and videos. They look absolutely amazing by the way. Just seeing my friends and how they swam so beautifully under the water was such a beautiful thing to see.
I meditated for an hour in the sea whilst just lying there with my eyes closed. I didn’t worry about anything. I was told I got taken out into deep waters but I’d always come back. This wasn’t even intended and I had no idea as my eyes were closed. I think the sea was keeping me safe and she looked after me, and didn’t put me in any danger.
It’s difficult to describe but whilst I was in the sea with all my friends, we bonded and connected in ways that I’ve never experienced before. Whilst in the blue lagoon cruise too, I managed to connect and speak to people who were complete strangers after jumping into the translucent waters of the blue lagoon.
It felt so amazing and looking under the water, I saw this world that I had never ever seen before. The sea contains immense beauty and if you trust in her, she will show you her wonders.
This may have been a holiday and that’s probably the reason why everyone connected so well. But I’ve seen this time and time again. I feel the sea has an amazing power to unite and encase everyone within her soul. She doesn’t discriminate between who or what you are or what you believe in.
If you just trust in her, you can see amazing things and feel the heartbeat of mother nature. She was here before us and I came to realise after people from Germany, USA, Norway describe their own seas, at the moment she isn’t hurting us. The Soul of the Sea will never punish us.
But what we are doing is hurting her by melting all these ice caps, and dumping huge amounts of salt into her waters. It will get to a point where her immune system will need to kick in, in order to ensure her own survival.
She’s not out to punish us, but she will eventually need to fight for her own survival. We are seeing the first signs of that, that we’re making her ill. I realised this after speaking to people from all around the world and hearing directly from them about the impacts we are having across our oceans.
Mother nature will never hurt us, but the power she has means that if we’re not careful she will have to respond much like an immune system. When you fall ill at first, it feels terrible. You have a fever, headaches and maybe a shiver.
It takes a while for your immune system to kick in before it starts producing antibodies once it learns and creates the RNA sequence for our white blood cells. It may take a few days but initially the virus keeps spreading and keeps hurting. When the immune system fights back, the illness starts to rebalance and we start recovering.
I think this is what will happen with the spirit of the sea. I’m not saying that we are an infection to be immobilised. But the pace of damage that we are causing to our oceans will lead to climate shifts.
Things that we are beginning to see. This is a reaction from mother nature to try to rebalance the inequity that we are creating in the soul of the earth. If we’re not careful, this rebalancing mechanism will be far too great that there will be no time for mitigation or adaptation, but simply a question of how many can we save?
I feel that the sea has a soul not in a religious sense. But I use the word more to describe the character or persona of a being. The sea is a being, it’s a living breathing world organism and an ecosystem which has a life.
It pulls in carbon dioxide from our atmosphere and provides us with the nutrients to feed the entire world. So she’s not just “a sea”. She is a living/breathing actual body that lives amongst us. And like all living things in my opinion she has a spirit and a soul. A soul can be harmed. It may not be an overnight event but as with many people, souls – because you can’t see it directly it takes a wave of negative energy to harm and hurt the soul of another being.
I think we are currently on that path with hurting the soul of the sea and I heard this, and felt this whilst I was meditating in her spirit.
We have to make changes, we are like children, seeing how far we can push before we end up getting hurt. But the rate we are going, there will be irrecoverable consequences.
I felt completely mesmerised and transfixed in the sea and I felt her spirit more than any human I’ve ever known. It was an incredible experience for me, much like a higher deity with a higher calling.