Sea Emocean
When my mother was seventeen—back in 1955—she wrote that “The sea beats like a great heart on which all life depends.” Sixty-five years has passed, and the only expression of ocean love I’ve heard that tops that is my phrase “sea emocean.” See? Emotion! I grew up in Illinois; my starfish photo that I had blown up to poster size, would console me when I broke my arm and sat, typing with one finger, working on my own poetry—at my mother’s very writing desk. Upon feeling nourished by looking at books of stained glass art with sea themes, I wondered what could induce our art museum to have an exhibit of such work. Meanwhile, for United Nations World Water Day, I found online a music piece idea calling for different sounds of water—the mentally ill senior citizens I worked with thought of 25 as we drank up our dixie cups of the precious liquid! Somehow, the phrase came to me, and I thought of a potential World Ocean Year called, in English, Sea Emocean—or, in other tongues, “Sea Love!”
People only care for what we know and love, despite efforts otherwise. We are only human. See—mind; emotion—heart. People are made up of seventy percent water, just like our planet’s surface. We sweat and weep salty water; our bodies go through cycles, just like ocean tides and waves. Islands we live on. The big backyard that connects all human neighbors holds huge and amazing (even as smart as us) creatures who get around the planet much better than we do. We people are not necessarily THE event on Earth!
But when we don’t love ourselves, the Earth suffers—because we hurt, and we are a part of the Earthly art. My latest understanding of humans suggests that we go through stages of life as one humanity: they parallel the psychological stages of a single, human female. The First Age was womb life, before the Big Bang; there was growing, evolving, when we humans engaged in a balance of female and male energy-interaction and became our species (Age Two). Then suddenly there were a fair amount of people on the Earth and history started. The beliefs switched from mostly goddess-and nature-worshipping to—in the English-speaking world, the location for our evolution, perhaps strangely—god-worshipping; thus the name for this age, that of the Trinity, a triple male godhead believed in by many (Catholics): the Third Age. This was our prime-of-life age, when science was developing but birth control was still considered immoral (you could call this understandable, since the thrust of this Age was toward population of our planet, in order for inventions and contacts to happen that would bring us as a human race along to the next stages). The Third Age was expansive but unsustainably so.
Now we are in a Fourth psychological stage. I like to call it Meta-pausal (“meta” meaning “referring to self”), since we are finally quitting our fascination with ourselves, our families, and our limited local communities. We are cocooning now but need to come out soon. Our malaise is part of our current stage; menopause can be very tricky for some women, and we have only just developed the technology to be connected worldwide. When we enter the next stage, we will have shifted our attention from our human family to larger aspects of the world—checking out what else is going on on Earth. We will need to create a language for the planet, but that will be no problem, since we have a way (finally) of depicting movement (Brenda Farnell’s Labanotation); and of course we can begin with the funniest expressions from each people.
The Fifth Age—Quintessence (“that of which all is made”)—is almost here, so don’t lose hope! Feeling together as a Planet, speaking to all of our neighbors, using our bodies for art, health, music, celebration, will be fulfilling and fun for all ages. It will take labor; we will have to move–to dance—and help each other without greed even being relevant. In this stage, we crawl out and fly around, like happy butterflies, whatever that may be like. Furthermore, in this stage we are secure—quite secure—because our mature body symbolism and use of computers will return us to a naturally balanced masculine/feminine-energy-interaction for the rest of history—and beyond!
This aberration of ours—his-story, the English language, the Trinity of male gods, whatever it was—grew like a plant on the Planet, but was never ideal, the way balanced male/female energy interaction is. (Look at the great Nigerian Yoruba, or the Ancient Greeks, with their male and female deities.) We needed it, as we refused to give up our youthful yet blind immaturity, for a time, but our old age stage will last forever, as the ultimate meaning of life (as opposed to the pre-human part of Stage Two, or the prime-of-life but unconnected Third stage). This Age needs to be embraced with love and enthusiasm so we can leave virus, racism, and sexism behind.
Eventually, I saw Sea Emocean as a tool for this purpose. Sharing our human relationship with our main planetary feature together could bring us emotionally closer together—a shared introspection on a planetary level might be just what the doctor ordered! Plus, it will be super fun—kids will eat it up, seaweed and all, ha ha ha. We should ask the 17-year-olds how to proceed, instead of being stuck like we’ve been drenched in molasses. Actually that sounds yummy—maybe we all have words to share! My idea for a Library of HumanKind could start us off: all people who have never seen the ocean get sent there, and everybody gets videoed about their ocean experiences, to save for posterity. For the Decade of Ocean Science and Sustainability (2021-2030), Sea Emocean/World Ocean Year would be a great start; surely we could put it together after the current climate of panic. We folks need help everywhere; let’s do it!