The light on the sea is good medicine

on wide horizons

Hello friends

I’ve been waking early lately. The background hum of anxiety that seems to be my default setting has been loud, driven by a constant, perpetual-motion churn of pointless, circular worry-thoughts that have no specific focus and therefore no plausible resolution.

Gleaming sea from Marwick Head

So I took myself up the hill to Marwick Head yesterday, to where high cliffs look out over the Atlantic and there’s nothing between you and the coast of Labrador but thousands of miles of ocean.

And light.

And air.

And salt wind.

And the flight lines of sea birds.

And the weather fronts riding in towards you, carrying gusts of rain or pools of sunlight.

And the wide curve of the horizon.

It never fails me, this medicine.

When I come up here I can feel something in me expanding, easing, releasing. It’s not that the thoughts stop. It’s that they seem to get smaller and smaller and smaller, until they just don’t matter that much any more.

I come up here to be reminded that we are not our thoughts or our feelings. That our internal weather comes and goes like the shifting light and waves and tides.

I come up here to be reminded that I don’t need to fix or get rid of those circular thoughts or unwelcome feelings. I just need to expand to make room for them and then they can just pass on through.

When we look up and out, into the distance, to that place on the sea horizon where the seeable falls away from us, something comes back into balance. It’s as if we are reconnecting with something still and expansive in ourselves, that gets drowned out by our internal chatter and anxiety.

I’ve kept this clipping from the Times Literary Supplement, of a poem, ‘Here’, by Kate Bingham, that captures this sensation.

Not everyone can go and look at the sea horizon, but I think we can get some of that sense of opening from just taking a moment to look up at the sky.

It’s a simple and readily available reconnection with what Buddhist monk and teacher Thich Nhat Hanh called ‘our true mind’

When we release our ideas, thoughts and concepts, we make space for our true mind. Our true mind is silent of all words and all emotions and is so much vaster than our mental constructs.

I think that’s why looking out to the sea horizon feels rebalancing. It reminds us that there is more to us than the thoughts and worries that generally clutter our minds. Something more spacious and calm. It’s that simple and that profound.

Down below, at the foot of the cliffs, the sea goes on beating at the rocks as it has done for millennia.

And when I turn back to look inland, Orkney’s late summer fields are a patchwork of greens and yellows.

All spread out under the same wide sky.

Looking inland over Orkney’s West Mainland late summer fields.

May you be able to look up, and out, wherever you are, and regain your balance.

– Sam

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