I was riding the BC ferries the other day, and at the beginning of the trip I was sitting in the front of the ship and a small child was wailing and crying. I was not all that irritated by this, although it would have been distracting if I was trying to read or something, but I could see the neutrality of the sound itself without going into too much of a reaction about it.
But it also crossed my mind to empathize with the child? what was this child feeling? what is the emotion of the wailing of a young toddler or infant? I don't know if what I got from this was an accurate understanding of the perspective of the infant, or just something that brought up for me personally, but I began to look out the windows, at this large expanse of sea around me.
And while the open vista of the sea, the islands, spanning out to the horizon, is typically seen as something very beautiful and attractive, I found in it a sense of vulgarity. I went out onto the sun deck, and was struck by this immense sense of perspective, the ship itself which was quite large, relatively speaking, feeling quite small, in this vast expanse of water, and feeling quite small to these large islands moving by.
There was a sense of the trauma of being born, and not trauma in the sense of abuse of an infant, but the trauma of coming into this realm of existence. Most people seem to become accustomed to it, they get acclimatized to being alive and existing in the universe. Of course you can point to all the awful conflicts and problems in the world as something to take despair in, but what I felt here was more simple than that.. it was looking out into this expanse of ocean, which we may see as beautiful, but also sensing that it was beautiful and terrible at the same time.. or terrifying.
It's like coming in this world, this domain, where things happen. It's a blessing and a curse. When I hear the wailing of a young child, I wonder, maybe it's just because they are hungry and cranky, or maybe it's because they are overloaded by this horror of reality, this horror of a life ahead of them. And you could see that, not in some grizzly crime scene or polluted industrial area.. but in nature itself.. this vast expanse of ocean and sky, and yourself, just being a tiny dot on a little boat going through the middle of it.
But this too was not such a big deal, because there was also the neutrality of it, like the neutrality of the sound of the kid's wailing. I knew that this wasn't the "Truth" ... just one perspective in the infinite tapestry of multiple realities and universes colliding with each other in the inter-subjective human experience. One aspect of the totality of human experience.. but even this sense of totality itself, inclusive of all, can at once be beautiful and terrifying, similar to this view of the sea, the sky and the horizon.
