One of my favorite classes that i took in university (i’m just kidding, I didn’t like the class, but I remember everything that I read…) was reading the original travel logs of OG explorers like Christopher Columbus (serious asshole), and Claude Levi-Strauss (much less of an asshole).  I was especially touched by the ending of his book about Brazil,  called Tristes Tropiques.

So Levi-Strauss ends Tristes Tropiques with this:

“Farewell to savages, then, farewell to journeying! And instead, during the brief intervals in which humanity can bear to interrupt its hive-like labours, let us grasp the essence of what our species has been and still is, beyond thought and beneath society: an essence that may be vouchsafed to us in a mineral more beautiful than any work of Man: in the scent, more subtly evolved than our books, that lingers in the heart of a lily; or in the wink of an eye, heavy with patience, serenity, and mutual forgiveness, that sometimes, through an involuntary understanding, one can exchange with a cat. ” -Claude Levi-Strauss

Let us grasp the essence of our ocean world. I strive to each minute I am blessed with underneath the surface,  on the shore, and anywhere in the fishy vicinity.

xxMerbabe