The Sea and Me

A difficult relationship

“In one drop of water are found all the secrets of all the oceans.”

– Kahlil Gibran

“And a huge dose of microplastics.”

– Ronald C. Flores-Gunkle

Sorry about that. It isn’t that I don’t love the sea. It is one of the things that inspired me to spend my life on a Caribbean island. My earliest memory of life in Puerto Rico is of an almost daily pilgrimage from my room a few miles inland to the beach. I even remember the first book I read there (while waves caressed the sand at my feet).

It was Rodolfo Usigli’s Corona de Sombra. As I relived the life and death of Maximiliano, Emperor of Mexico, and his mad wife Carlota, and stopped to brush sand from the pages of my Spanish-English dictionary, I watched seagulls celebrate the birth of my new world, an infant afloat in the amniotic Atlantic.

OK, I wax poetic. The sea does that — or did that to me as a young man. Now as an old man, I rarely make the long pilgrimage to the edge of the earth. The closest beach is only about 15 miles away but I prefer to spend the waning days of my long life sitting atop a mountain near the rainforest, contemplating the island that is around and below me.