Missing the sea...

It has been about 10 days since my last swim... We've had big storms and lots of rain, but I was also travelling. I am so excited about getting into the ocean tomorrow, and the reason for writing today is to share this poem (before I forget...).

I love Pablo Neruda's work and this poem is called 'The Sea'

I need the sea because it teaches me. I don’t know if I learn music or awareness, if it’s a single wave or its vast existence, or only its harsh voice or its shining suggestion of fishes and ships.

The fact is that until I fall asleep, in some magnetic way I move in the university of the waves.

It’s not simply the shells crunched as if some shivering planet were giving signs of its gradual death;

no, I reconstruct the day out of a fragment, the stalactite from the sliver of salt, and the great god out of a spoonful.

What it taught me before, I keep. It’s air ceaseless wind, water and sand.

It seems a small thing for a young person, to have come here to live with his own fire; nevertheless, the pulse that rose and fell in its abyss, the crackling of the blue cold, the gradual wearing away of the star, the soft unfolding of the wave squandering snow with its foam, the quiet power out there, sure as a stone shrine in the depths, replaced my world in which were growing stubborn sorrow, gathering oblivion, and my life changed suddenly: as I became part of its pure movement.

Pablo Neruda (1904-1973)