World Oceans Day

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“The Memory of Salt and Sky”

Who really knows, and who can swear,
How creation came, when or where!
Even gods came after creation’s day—
Who really knows, who can truly say?
— Rig Veda 10.129

The sea was calm today, with the tide at its full height. The moon lay fair upon the straits, casting a silver sheen over the waters like a benediction. Light blinked and vanished from a distant lighthouse, cliffs loomed in quiet watch, and gulls threaded across the sky like prayer beads unspooling a rosary of longing.

You don’t need to be a tide to rise and fall.
You don’t have to be a wave to touch the shore.
Sometimes it is enough to be small and still,
and know the rhythm in your grain.

Lately, my thoughts have grown lucid, like sea-glass smoothed by years of wave-breath. And in this clarity, I return always to the sea—the one who holds me, calls to me, pulses through my being. It is not a fascination; it is a remembering. I am bound to it—not with chains, but with tides of soul.

Each sea, I have come to know, has its own signature consciousness. The Pacific with its deep meditative silence and ancient wisdom. The Atlantic, ever the philosopher, brooding and poetic. The Indian Ocean hums like an old lullaby from a motherland I cannot name. The Southern, crisp and sacred, whispers truths only ice can preserve. The Arctic? A shaman’s breath—quiet, cold, mercilessly honest.

They are not bodies of water. They are bodies of being.

The sea I know best changes colour by the hour. Silver at dawn. Green at noon. Indigo in the arms of dusk. At times, it blushes a furious red like it’s remembering something too painful to hold. Some days, it wears the sheen of old coins, and other days, it is a mirror broken into shards by sunlight. There’s magic in the clouds’ shadows dragging across it, in the sun-touched patches like forgotten love letters. And in the distance, the cry of gulls carries the laugh of someone I once knew.

I confess—this is my favourite view.
Not that I’ve seen much else.
Just the sea, the brooding rocks, and the sky’s changing moods.

Sometimes, I lose myself in communion with the sea so completely that all other communication feels like noise. I do not speak. I listen. The sea doesn’t always speak in words—it speaks in memory, texture, pressure, rhythm. It whispers across lifetimes, it echoes myths not yet written.

Everything is drawn to it—perhaps not for what it offers, but for what it awakens. It is theatre. It is lover. It is destroyer. One moment, calm and motherly, arms wide, salt-kissed lullabies—
and the next?
A tempestuous artist smashing coastlines like unfinished canvases. Breaking islands. Unmaking certainty.

And yet—there’s humour, too.
Playfulness.
The way it lifts children, tips windsurfers, steals sandals, nudges boats toward mischief.
It knows delight. And that, perhaps, is its most sacred wisdom.

“Do you know,” said a man once, sitting on the rocks, “the moon makes love to the sea—and from their divine union comes the tide?”

His companion, knowing no better, nodded.

But I heard the truth in that moment—and it was deeper, stranger, sadder.

When the Brahmanda broke, the cosmos spilled into everything. In that explosion, the Earth—Prithvi—emerged, carrying the womb of existence. But even that wasn’t the beginning of love. No. The sea was formed in the churning aftermath, a child of conflict and cosmos, never quite whole.

One day, harmony fractured. Something shifted. And in that great upheaval, the sea bed tore, as if grief were being born.

So today, when a tide curls toward the moon, it is not just water rising. It is a memory trying to reach its source. I see the wave drinking in moonlight, tasting a lost part of itself. I want to call out to it—
“I see you. I feel you.”
But I do not.
Instead, I stare upward as well, sharing the same ache.

For a brief moment,
I am the wave.
And the wave is me.

But the moment is gone before it can anchor.
The pain the wave carries is older, deeper than mine.

You see, when the ocean was churned, it gave birth to more than foam and horses.
It birthed consciousness.
Crystals.
And from its depth came the soul of the sea—a tranquil, luminous force of healing and light.

The Moon. Chandra.

He was the son of the ocean.
But the sea only glimpsed him.
A fleeting joy—before Chandra was taken, thrown skyward, never to return.

And so the sea roars. It fights the wind. It challenges the mountains. But it cannot reclaim its soul. It can only raise tides—each one a desperate prayer to reach the beloved.

You think the sea is violent?
Listen again.

It is grief you hear.

It is the agony of knowing your essence is somewhere out there…
and you can never hold it.

The moon, of course, does not fight.
He keeps to his course.
He does not beg or rage.
He pulls by being.
And that is his power.
Gentle. Faithful. Unwavering.

So no—this isn’t a love story in the way you might imagine.
It is not about reunion.
It is about presence.
The sea reaches. The moon surrenders.
Both are true love.

And as for me…

I am the one who listens to it all.
Who bears the weight of tide and foam, storm and story.
I am the memory keeper, the confidante.
I am the sand,
the shore,
the bank of the ocean.

And in my stillness, I cradle the restless longing of the sea.

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