The Sun and the Sea

    I keep a personal journal and I was going to write this in there but then I thought: Why not blog about it?  So I am. The pictures were taken by my father.

    My family and I just returned from a 7 day cruise along the Mexican Riviera.  I never used to understand why anybody would pay so much just to eat and shop and dance.  I didn't see why people didn't just fly directly to their destinations and spend as much time as they wanted exploring and hiking.  I'm still not sure what other people's reasons are, but mine is the ocean.  I miss it so much now that it's like a physical pain.  

     I live in California, and beaches are hardly scarce here.  But there is nothing like the rocking movement of a ship cutting through waves.  You can go outside any time you like, and hear the roar of the sea, feel the salty spray, squint into the sun.  I filled half of a new notebook with the things I thought of as I stood there.  Some of the things I wrote are silly, and some quite profound, I think.  But some never got recorded and are lost to me forever.  Technically they're still swimming around in my brain, but I'll never be able to remember them again.  
    What impressed me most about the wide outdoors was not the sea, but the sun.  My father and I woke early on the first day-Monday the 23rd-and went to the 13th deck to watch the sunrise.  It was bitterly and gloriously cold.  An exerpt from my journal:

The sun was magnificent, a great flaming orb that left a golden pathway to it, as if to say: "Come find me if you dare!"  I have never been so moved as I was then, by that sun.  I fancied that if I looked closely enough, I could see the sea mirrored on its fiery surface.  
The sun is very proud.  Its ascent is defiant, almost haughty.  "Admire me, revere me, worship me if you will" the sun says from up high "but I will continue to rise and set even if mankind did not exist.  If every clock in the world broke, I would be unaffected.  At least then you silly humans would see that I am above time, which is after all, a manmade thing."-about an hour later, from the Blue Lagoon Restaurant.

    Now we are back home, and I miss the rocking of the deck.  I miss the way the sun glittered on the surface of the water like a million sapphires.  I miss the bite in the air, and the salt.  I miss Mexico.  
    I still don't like the pounding, meaningless club music they insist on playing 24/7, or the excessive eating, but that's a small price to pay for the sea and the sun and the wind.  
    

“My soul is full of longing
for the secret of the sea,
and the heart of the great ocean
sends a thrilling pulse through me.”

 ~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow