Anyone Cares to Stroll to the Beach?

Yippie, I'll be going to the beach today after so many months. The question is, will I do the same "thing" that I used to do there when I was but a sapling and was definitely less corrupted by the lures of the material world? Wait, what is that "thing"? Read on:

"There I was, standing on the salt-crusted sand and watching the frothy white foam of water wash over my feet. I had returned to behold the cradle of life, where the first microscopic animals and plants mysteriously emerged billions of years ago from a concoction of warm organic soup. The streak of horizon cut through the panorama into two parts. The top featured the grey-blue sky with a slight tinge of coppery-yellow and flaming red as it reflected the dying ray of the sun. It was evening. The bottom half was the seemingly endless stretch of blue water I have learned to honour: the sea.

A great deal of my life was spent close to the sea. The house where I spent my childhood years was a mere few hundred metres away. From the top of the balcony, I could see white dots – waves – decorating the otherwise plain blue coloration of the seawater. Well, it was not actually plain blue. A closer scrutiny would reveal a gradual gradation from light cyan at the water edge to almost dark violet at the horizon. My uncle used to tell me that the colour of the sea held a curative power; gazing long and far out to the sea would relax and heal one’s eyesight, which was frequently abused under long hours of gluing onto the television screen. I had never doubted him though, never sceptical of what he said because something in me said that the sea hides boundless mysterious power yet unveiled before mankind.

I loved the sea so much that I gave her a personal name of my design. Clearly, by applying the pronoun “her’, I have always regarded the sea as a feminine entity, whose complex moods swing precariously from a benevolent mother of the fish and squids to a violent sorceress hell-bent on destroying everything in her stormy fury. Of her name I choose not to reveal but of my connection to sea I will unravel. When most people say, “I’m going to the sea/beach,” they mean that they are planning to fish, surf, swim, or just hang around stretching their back after long hours of excruciating weekday work. They understood the sea as little more than just a recreational spot, a place to let loose the raw energy inside so that at the end of it, they only want to crawl back home for a long night snore.

I, on the other hand, visit the sea to carve. Not to carve a statue of “David” rivalling that of renowned Michelangelo, but to carve my thoughts on the sea sand, which is often blended together with brittle shell bits and rounded stones by the violent sloshing and twirling of waves as they collide. The thoughts are conceived in the likeness of a city blueprint or a topographic map of a region. My mind was eager to instruct my hands – the carving tools – to materialise the abstract faintness of the conception into a reality visible to the human eye. So I carved, removing sand from one place to another, building plateaus, lowlands, canals, rivers, farmlands, towns and bridges. As I watched my work gradually resembling the intricate details of the conception, my heart would fill with an unexplained glee, as though the completion would satisfy an intangible demand of an abstruse whim.

The sea is never static; she changes not only with seasons, but also with years as she reveals different part of the beach at one moment and hides them under her saline water at another. Once, she retreated away from a rocky area, revealing a shallow, partially sand-covered rock pool of an elongated oval shape. It immediately caught my attention as I descended on the area to search for a suitable sand canvas for carving. What really intrigued me about the rock pool were the combination of fine, easy-to-handle sand texture and the presence of pond back water. It allowed for a greater dynamism in my work as I could utilise both elements to inch closer to an imagination humming in my head: an island city, well actually model of one.

At the end of being splattered with wet sand, landing a wrong footing on sharp rocky outcrops and earning a red bruise was a realisation: a large D-shaped platform flanked by a placid “lake” – which happened to be the original rock pool - on the straight side and a canal running in an arc with both ends adjoining the “lake”. The sandy platform was so flat that a scoop of water poured on the former was confused of where to flow, only to sink in through the sand in three minutes or so. The platform in turn was divided by smaller canals interlacing one another to form smaller, roughly rectangular sections. These reminded me of the chinampa – low-lying tract of man-made island used by the Mesoamericans for agriculture – and the totality of the islands, or islands system as I would like to call it, felt like a surreal reminiscent of Tenochtitlan.

Caught in the drifting of my thoughts, I was imagining various crops growing exuberantly on the fertile islands, boats of all shape and sizes sailing up and down the canals, caravans of traders streaming through the land bringing exotic goods and exchanging them for the agricultural wealth of the locals. Then I thought, a land that is so bountiful must have a king, or at least a ruling class, to maintain the administration of its people and resources. Almost instantaneously, I set off working and piling sands on a lone rocky step on the edge of the island system, to form a high plateau complete with a pyramid overlooking the expanse below. The work apparently never ended there as I went to the extent of digging a river leading to the lake to prevent the latter from drying out. Fed by a torrential influx of new ideas, my hands could not be stilled as I carved, carved and continue carving.
All in all, it was imagination let loose and running wild. It was a sense of a new-found freedom - the freedom of thoughts - and a gushing will – the will to make reality out of thoughts. Though, the sensation never rivalled the enlightenment Buddha attained under the bodhi tree, it was a triumph to me. Tucked within this tiny frame of a Homo sapiens sapiens was a new found power, the sort of enthusiasm to convert the abstract conception into physically discernible matter. I thought, perhaps this was the drive that man has long exploited to wrestle himself free of Nature and become an entity semi-independent of the environment itself. With the primal rule of “eat or be eaten” banished from the worries of a civilised man, he can then manipulate his mental faculty to experiment and invent various creations such as the wheel, wing and sadly war.

Yes, war. Man has long been at war with Nature, always scheming to take away more than what the latter can give. Man has stolen clean water, replacing it with filthy sludge oozing out from factories and septic tanks of home. He has cut down trees, exposing the nakedness of the land to be raped by torrential rains and scorching heat of the sun. Even the sea fails to flee from the vile atrocity of man, as her water ran afoul due to accidental oil spill and her fish was harvested almost to the brink of extinction. Sometimes, the devastation wrought by the 2004 tsunami seems more like an apt revenge exacted on the ignorance and selfishness of the human kind than some scientific esplanations. Somehow, I felt compelled to halt my work. Enough was enough. If I were to continue working, Iwould fill up the whole rock pool and deprive small fishes and crustaceans of a watery refuge during the low tides.

The definition of the sea as the salt water covering nearly three quarter of the Earth surface seems to fall short of meaning. She seems to mean much more to me, as the experience with this magnificent offspring of Mother Nature has carved a path of learning for me to stride. I guess it is not an overstatement to glorify her as a silent teacher, whose aura mingles thoroughly with the flow of thoughts to deliver a comprehension not only about her, but also about mankind. To even scrape the surface of the deep knowledge she holds takes a stubborn determination of the mind and body and the sincere commitment of the soul. But once you know her, you will never forget her."

Okay, enough with all the verbosity and surreal disillusionment. I'm thinking whether i should bring along a pail and a spade so not to sore my hands with the rough sand. Ah, forget about it. Just go.....