February 7th, 2020 - Mediatations 1
Over the course of my life I have nearly drowned on 4 occasions. Twice as a toddler, and twice as a young adult. Somewhere, deep in my unexamined subconscious these experiences have caused anxieties, unwittingly triggered during the uber-forced water polo games during high school gym classes. At some point it occurred to me that if the water wanted to take me so badly, that I could benefit by shifting my perspective from fearing the water’s strangle to welcoming it’s expansive embrace. This was coupled with an opportunity to dive the Great Barrier Reef at the end of a two-week tour of a production in Australia. After some weeks of training in an online course, in a pool, and in the real, wet, wide ocean, I received my scuba certification. The ocean has since become a teacher to me, creating tremendous opportunity for study. On the decks of rolling boats, and dozens of feet beneath the surface I am hypnotized by a rhythm of the world. The sea is a body, and it is miraculous to feel it breathe. Humankind has certainly executed its fair share of colonizing, imperializing, assimilation, erasure, and other various kinds of barbaric and thoughtless acts, and yet, the sea, while endangered by the activities of man, has remained largely unconquered. Its spaces are vast and full of the unknown, and the parts that are “known” remain wild and unpredictable. Even in the future, the year of 2020, we have barely scratched the surface of what the water holds, and in fact I think unknown spaces of the world become more important, as less of them exist. Without the unknown, we no longer have wonder, and without wonder we no longer have play, and without play we no longer have discovery, and without discovery we become the uninspired machines that capitalism wishes us to be. The ocean is vast, and powerful, and has no concern for the scopes or designs of humanity. It is not a space for us, and its resistance to subjugation is something to behold, and something to mirror. There are no Starbucks in the ocean, although there are plenty of Starbucks remnants. Coffee cups, green plastic straws, and plenty of room-for-cream sweeps its way across the sea every day. Uncountable artifacts of our existence; these tendrils of capitalism reach out in an attempted demonstration of power and influence, trying to mark the sea as a claimed space. Like a flag on the moon, Starbucks endeavors to occupy an alien landscape. But in contrast to the infancy of capitalism, the sea is ancient, and untamed, and resistant, and has experienced the time before and after our beloved anthropocene. The sea is adaptive, reactive, and shockingly communicative. The sea is rising. It’s redefining the boundaries of our world, without care for our governments, our best laid plans, or our ingenuity, and so in the shadow of its wake, I choose to be embraced by its wisdom, and to learn what I can from its ancient and edgeless tomes. I have been spoiled by my teacher, the sea. I learned how to breathe under the ocean, reminding me of my amniotic embrace. The laws of the land are weak and suffocating, making it easy to forget our own fundamentals.
