As Large as Alone Anne Ashworth writes about the self and the sea as a universal symbol of the Oneness of things.
If you walk seawards along the north side of The Square in St Anne’s-on-Sea, tread slowly. Set in the pavement are slabs with words on them. Gradually the words build into a poem, describing three children visiting the seaside.
The point of the poem is that what each child finds there reflects her particular personality. One, for instance, has found: a smooth round stone, as small as the world and as large as alone.
The final slab tells us Whatever we lose like a you or a me it’s always ourselves we find in the sea.
At once we know what the child with the pebble felt. She had been told that ‘it’s a small world’, but was aware of herself alone in a huge space. The human condition. And in the nature of human beings, ‘it’s always ourselves we find’ in whatever company or situation life places us. The finding may be a positive or a negative experience, a fulfilment or an exposure of weakness.
But what is the significance of the sea? As an ancient archetype, the sea represents the unconscious, which may at critical moments or times of rare clarity open to reveal something of our ‘selves’ to ourselves. The sea is also a universal symbol of the Oneness of things, of eternity, of God. Whatever our beliefs or unbelief, when forced to confront the ultimate questions of life and death and the nature of the universe we find it difficult to avoid the question of our own personal significance in the totality of things.
Which brings us to those chilling lines about losing ‘a you or a me’. Most of us are desperate to hold on to our identity, yet identity changes through life. As childhood, youth, experience and ageing add to what we are, at the same time – and especially in later years – comes the experience of being stripped. In so far as what we are is constructed by interaction with people around us, we lose parts of our identity as we, for instance, leave behind student friends, change jobs, remove, divorce, are bereaved or disabled. To many older people, lacking the scope for new relationships and fresh endeavours, such strippings seem unmitigated. It can happen to the young too, if so stunted by lack of education, poverty or substance abuse that they have no confidence in their own identity and are unable to believe in their own potential.
For these people, old or young, there remains ‘the sea’.
Ready to be no more than a drop finding the ocean, some seek oblivion through suicide or drugs. Others may find a faith in God, or in the interconnectedness of all things, the Oneness proclaimed by the ancient mystics which now seems confirmed by modern physics. Jenny Joseph has a poem called The Inland Sea, in which that sea is a symbol of a lifelong journey towards ultimate wisdom. Are we, perhaps, not only programmed to find ourselves in ‘the sea’, but equally to find ‘the sea’ in ourselves? Though humans hold passionately to their personal individuality, there is also apparently a widespread inclination towards merging. And not only in desolation. Even at supreme moments of joy in love, the urge is to become one with the beloved.
I am a temporary aggregation of molecules, which when I die will be released for recycling. Increasingly, I find this a pleasing thought. For as the years continue to advance one can view death with equanimity (if not the process of dying, which remains to be feared). As things, people and our own capacities are stripped away, we may realise that one no longer actually needs what is irrevocably lost, and moreover that at the end one no longer needs even a self. I shall be ready to be lost in the sea. It will be enough to be part of the whole, leaving strewn about that pebbly beach such influences as one may have unconsciously exerted, glad that one’s material particles will be reused.
AnneAshworth has been an active member of SoF from its inception.It was through SoF that she left the URC and joined the other SoF:Society of Friends.She is a poet and (non-professional) editor.
Previously published in The Universalist and reprinted with permission from the editor.