A Sea Full of Stars
It doesn’t happen often. Some people will sail all their lives and never have the experience.
The ocean, as smooth as glass, after days and days of calm, then a light breeze, no more than a zephyr, really, but enough to haul up the drifter and glide, the only ripples are the ones that slip along the hull and converge silently behind.
The breeze was warm, a subtle caress over forehead and cheek. Above, the night sky is so thick with stars; I can read by the starlight. What is counted as a starry night on land — with the exception of the deep deserts and untenanted mountaintops — is a pale counterfeit of the heavens seen from the middle of an ocean.
When wind and wave aren’t playing their games together, the ocean is a bastion of silence. Even the slim lines of my vessel don’t disturb the water enough to make a hiss. And all around, the stars are reflected, the effect unsettling, as if we were suspended in the middle of space, depthless and infinite.
Here, thoughts are loud and insistent, and ideas hold a terrifyingly acute clarity. For those who aren’t at ease with themselves, those who need distraction or entertainment, it’s a frightening place. All these thoughts and feelings, the mind insistent on bringing them up in this place of fragile magic.
Who am I? Where am I going? What have I learned? What can I do? What can’t I do?
The answers change with every new event, every new circumstance. They’re not as compelling as the questions of what is really important — what can this short life hold that, at the end, will seem as all effort was worthwhile and satisfaction, ever slightly tainted with regret, is felt.
My life shrinks to microscopic importance and conversely becomes all-encompassing, all I have, both at the same time. My choices and decisions will never change the world — and that is a relief, when it comes right down to it — and my actions alone will harm none either. It’s clear that the planet, along with its myriad lifeforms that evolve and die out and change constantly, will not be affected, even by a species that considers itself omnipotent. Blast it to hell and gone, and life will emerge again, in a different form. Genes might be changed but the struggle will go on as it has always, finding the niches and growing and thriving. The joke will be on the species who think themselves dominant, when their short lives wither and fail before the soils and seas and other species have regenerated.
In starlight, in silence, the true immensity of the world can be felt. It will take weeks to cross this ocean. Take away technology and the planet grows huge again. That’s reassuring to some, frightening to others.
Twisting lazily behind in the bubbles of the wake, a trolled line jerks tight. Winding it in, the fish leaping at the end is neither too large nor too small. Just right for a midnight meal.
I am contented here. There is no striving to be done, no one else whom I must please or modify behaviour. We — my sleek, small yacht and I — make our miles without effort and with no sense of passing time. I have food and water and the chance to think, to reflect and contemplate and consider. Words return to me with greater emotion and clarity, things I struggled to understand in the hurly-burly of city life. Some strike a resonance so deep I know I will never forget them.
Perhaps it is all delusion, and on returning to people I will become trapped in the games again. I hope not.
