(Possible) disappearance

There is a nostalgic aspect to it as well, I think → it holds the possibility of erasing everything. You feel very helpless when you are around it or in front of it.

The nostalgia I am talking about is cultural nostalgia. Culturally, I think there is this longing (towards the ocean). A longing to be swallowed by it. The ocean suggests a (possible) disappearance of the human being(s) into it. You see people going into it , far out into it, + you don’t know if and when they are going to come out. You get the sense that you are going in to an environment that makes you vulnerable.

L.M. Feeling so small, an acute sense of disarmament. The feeling that I can just disappear, I am not important. In front of the ocean, forget about it, you are nothing.

There is a hippie colony near this beach and I once saw a naked woman park her baby in a stroller on the beach right in front of huge breaking waves. Then she went into the wild surf with the incredible undertow, leaving the baby to watch unattended. The view from the baby’s perspective must have been profoundly impressible and primordial, witnessing her mother disappearing into the massive waves with all the sounds of the breaking waves and wind raging around her. I was the only other person on the beach which was many kilometers long.

Around the Fiji islands, I travelled to many parts of the archipelago by small motor boat or canoe. Sometimes the water is so deep, that it’s bottomless. As one floats in such bottomless waters the sun shines on the body + all the while, your shadow disappears into the endless depths. This is quite an ontological and richly animated experience and beyond description once again.