Editorial: The Marine Metaphor

December 1995 - January 1996

This is an article from WaveLength Magazine, available in print in North America and globally on the web.

by Alan Wilson

Cover Photo: Tropical Pursuits - Belize Courtesy of Slickrock Adventures

This earth is really a water planet. Not only are the oceans two thirds of the surface area, but more importantly, the vast majority of the habitable environment is marine, with up to ninety per cent of the globe's organisms living in the immense volume of the ocean.

We are water beings -- over seventy per cent of our bodies is water. Brine pulses through us. Our pores ooze with it. The flow of liquid through us is essential to life. While we can survive for weeks without food, if we're deprived of water for a few days, we're toast.

We go to enormous lengths to pipe water into our dwellings and immerse ourselves in it. We build pools of it to play and relax in. We cluster around the shorelines of our oceans for sustenance, both physical and spiritual.

Life on earth originated in the sea, just as each of us individually originate in an aqueous environment. And we are driven by desires for the "oceanic" experience, the ultimate rapture of moist mingling with another, and the watery moment of creation.

In truth, we have only recently and incompletely adapted to a terrestrial lifestyle. But in that time we have spread far and wide over the landscape, conquering and building, entrenching and establishing ourselves as the pre-eminent terrestrial species, our minds fixated on the task of fortifying our positions.

Now, however, as the millennium draws to a close, we are beginning to see the cracks and flaws in our built-up world. We begin to suspect that our obsession with structure has some drawbacks. The thousand year Reich was a joke, and maybe our other terrestrial aspirations and institutions are equally transitory.

Perhaps we need to rethink the dominant terrestrial metaphor and let our thoughts flow back to the seas for fresh inspiration, back to the ebb and flood of tides, to the rush of currents, to the excitement of winds and waves, to the placid joy of calm waters... the true fluid medium of life on this watery planet.

What if we begin to employ a more aqueous language, not one of rigid forms, hard-edged boundaries, spatial separations... but immersion, flow, buoyancy?

What if we could relax our concern with walls, protection, defence, control, solidity, permanence... and enter a more unbounded realm of thought and feeling, expressing ourselves in more fluid terms?

As quantum physics shows, we are not entirely particulate in nature, but also wave forms, undulations, pulses, energy. Let's pay more attention to the bubbling, surging, flowing energy within us.

I offer this for your consideration... give it a try. See what happens when you allow the marine metaphor to operate. See if you can't dissolve some of the hard things in your life, begin to thaw, melt, flow around them.

Maybe at the very least, if we tried this, we might begin to pay more attention to our planet's life blood... instead of using it as a sewer.