Underneath the restless surface, the ocean maintains its silence. It swallows mild and sound with equal simplicity, holding thoughts in currents too serious for people to follow. Waves accident against our shores like air from the edge of rest, but that is maybe not its correct voice. Its correct style is hidden far below, wherever force could break steel, wherever number sunlight has actually touched, where time actions therefore gradually it nearly stops.
Every drop of seawater has lived one thousand lives — as air, as rain, as snow, as tears. It has moved vessels to war, etched out coastlines, drowned entire towns, and cradled whole sides of life unseen. Yet for many its energy, the sea is patient. It does not describe itself. It keeps its techniques beneath miles of moving orange, heavy in trenches and canyons older than the hills themselves.
We read across its floor, comfortable within our noise, our Planet, our nets, our satellites. However the water does not increase to generally meet us. It listens. It endures. It understands that long following our slots crumble and our maps disappear, it will still be here, taking the moon's gravity like a pulse, shaping the continents in silence. We measure it, we state it, we title its seas as though it goes to us — but we're only short-term visitors.
You will find areas where in fact the water is indeed however, you can hear your own personal pulse echoing in your ears. And you will find places where the roar of dunes can deafen you, however even that noise is one of the wind, not to the water. The ocean's language is older, calmer — a language written in tides, in the migrations of whales, in the hushed bloom of plankton beneath a midnight sea. It addresses in the move of currents that can take generations to complete an individual enterprise, in the gradual shifting of coral reefs that develop one quiet air at a time.
We believe we all know the sea because we've mapped its surface. But the simple truth is, nearly all of it stays untouched, unknowable. Beneath their surface, entire ecosystems succeed without a touch of our existence. Creatures spark in the blackness with borrowed gentle, hills increase more than Everest, valleys reduce greater compared to the Grand Canyon, and rivers of superheated water spill from ports that can melt stone. We're young ones at the shoreline, looking in to a night we could never completely enter.
And yet, for many its distance from us, the sea designs our lives more than we realize. It breathes for all of us, producing the air that fills our lungs. It provides the heat of the sun around the world, choosing the fate of storms and seasons. It feeds people, garments us, and however we handle it as although it is apart from us, like its depths aren't linked to our survival. We toxin their seas with plastic, choke its reefs with heat, strip their life away — and still it continues, calmly absorbing significantly more than we give back.
But actually persistence has limits. You can find signs today, whispers in the present, that the sea is changing. Tides creep higher with each moving year, glaciers weep in to the sea, and the warmth of the surface starts to bleed deeper and greater below. If the ocean is speaking, it's in the slow climbing of their fingers, in the distant mastery of snow breaking from cliffs, in the odd migrations of fish seeking colder worlds.
The sea does not shout. It does not trend for attention. Nonetheless it recalls everything. It recalls the meteors that broken sides before ours, the tectonic changes that exposed their first basins, the woods that considered rock beneath their waves. It recalls the songs of whales that traveled a huge selection of miles, the wreckage of civilizations swallowed full, the weight of individual ambition rusting gently in the dark. It will hold these memories for so long as it exists, flip them greater and deeper into their depths till they're indistinguishable from the water itself.
Perhaps one day, the ocean may increase large enough to reclaim what we developed, much less punishment, but within the period it's always known. Our highways can become reefs, our systems may number fish, our towns will undoubtedly be softened by mud and coral till they're unrecognizable. And still the ocean will soon be silent, maybe not out of cruelty, but from the same patience it has always shown.
We think of ourselves as masters of the ocean because we are able to travel across it, drill into it, scatter satellites to monitor its moods. But expertise can be an illusion. The water has lasted bulk extinctions, moving climates, and years of upheaval a long time before we arrived. It will endure people as well. Their currents can outlast our civilizations, their tides will rinse clean the remnants of our living, and its depths will remain a refuge for a lifetime that has number need for our recognition.
We won't be here forever. Nevertheless the ocean will. Long following our names are forgotten, it'll continue to holder the moonlight on its area, continue steadily to shape the shorelines with the slow beat of tides. It will continue to hide their techniques where no-one can feel them, in a night therefore complete it is practically holy.
The ocean won't ever inform us their story.
We ought to leap in to its silence and sense it for ourselves.