Reading the Waves, Crests and Swells

When the waves come ashore, some like charging knights ready for battle especially during the rainy season , I feel both a sense of laughter bubbling up in me as well as a kinship with the charging knights. 

Watching the waves gather muscle, rise high. as they do in the monsoon growing to  daunting at heights over ten feet even. They come racing to the shore, threatening to destroy everything in their wake, dissolving into bubbles of swash as they hit the shoreline, sometimes so hard that I lose my footing. I’m always stunned by the power the water is able to muster. 

Then there are the breaking swell waves or surface waves, generated by the wind - gentler crests not quite so roused, 

When I swim in the sea, I love diving under the large hefty, swollen waves, instead of being hit with their watery might. And, yes, I do feel victorious to have evaded their bashing. Although many others revel in just that. They wait for the waves to crash into them, eyes burning with the salt, quite excited by the adventure. But I’m not. 

Life’s dealt enough blows. I’ve bled, the hearts bled, and I’m not willing to go through those punishing rituals again. Call it wisdom, call it awareness and experience or simply fatigue, I just can’t invite these factors into my life willingly, not when I’ve learnt better. 

It was a lifeguard who taught me to go under the waves and it’s such a thrill to do that, because no matter the power of the crests above, it’s calm, very calm below.  Quite like what the yogis tell us about the peace deep within our beings - under the turbulence of our emotional selves. 

Our emotions have a terrain of their own, they are a landscape in themselves, kind of geography of emotion. 

These narrowly cropped images are evocative of this geography - of the various kinds of fuming, fury, aggression, irritation and just plain pissed feelings  I have read  in the waves, crests and swells of the Arabian Sea. 

 Reflecting phases of my own. Revisiting them, allowing myself to acknowledge the feelings and honour them. Not always by creating a Tsunami, but just by knowing what I feel. 

Nature, especially the sea is so unfettered in her expressions that I often draw courage and succour from her ways. 

All images shot on i14pro 

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