Still Moving
On oceans, rivers, and the lake I hope to become.
Growing up by the ocean is as lucky as I have ever felt. Old people used to say that there’s nothing that salt water cannot cure.
The ocean as a natural force amazes me, intimidates me and inspires me, with its capability. Being the place where life started, where the first living forms came from, where the majority of oxygen comes from, where surreal creatures live, this magical, beautiful, intimidating, temperamental force showed me that beauty, vastness, depth, danger, creation, force, and destruction can coexist in one being. And since this idea was unconsciously inserted in my brain, I kept aiming to be an ocean, to embody these characteristics; and in the back of my unconscious, this tendency of destruction, temperamental, prone to disasters, this gorgeous thing that can destroy and erase as well as create, also embodies.
For many years I was an ocean, with this force of life crashing to the shore without direction, without a path, a majestic force filled with hunger for life, beauty, temperamental; I was throwing all of me and in doing so I was destroying instead of aiming.
Now the river. A flowing current, always in movement towards a goal, with direction, strength, full of life, less temperamental, less prone to disasters or destruction. The river doesn’t need to be vast, it works, flowing towards the final destination with all that it has, it trusts itself to reach.
As much as I love to be a river, I aim to one day become a lake with my own borders, limits, sitting still in between a beautiful landscape surrounded by high trees, birds and soft air. Having all I need, not seeking a way anymore, not because I can’t, but because I don’t need to anymore. Everything is in one place, calm water, with its current underneath, still with force but no need to show so, just nurturing. No destruction, no mystery, just peaceful currents and a surface that moves according to the whispers of the wind.
Maybe early youth is where all of us are oceans, and then we evolve to rivers in our mid-twenties or thirties, until we reach the lake in our existence.
I’m a river, or at least the beginning of one. The current is in a path, the destination doesn’t matter because I’m moving through a goal, whereas as an ocean I was just throwing destructive energy to the shore.
The ocean was first, then the rivers, and somehow lakes got to be.