The white hyacinth

We are about halfway through our journey. Almost exactly four weeks in feels like an eternity. You exist in a kind of trans between being a human and being part of something much bigger. A part of The Sea.

You become quite the philosopher when you stand as lookout on the front deck on a sunny day and hum to one of Evert Taubes many anthems. I can’t help but feel so small, as good as irrelevant, compared to her, The Mighty Sea. The singularity who has existed ever since the dawn of earth and will continue to exist until the sun dies. Can you imagine that? A force as great and powerful as the sun itself. An entity with the power to create and destroy whenever she feels like it. I solely believe that The Sea, in a way, is our exact opposite. Meanwhile we tiny humans do everything in our way to dig up all the hidden treasures of the world, no matter the consequences, The Sea does everything in her way to make sure we never succeed with our goal. We will never understand The Sea, much like how we will never understand space. We will always lose compared to her, she always wins! That is why you always hear stories of people who, in their youth dreamt about visiting the sea, but only as adults manage to do so. The feeling is always the same, they suddenly feel complete. That is because we humans need to live at the edge of a goddess we do not understand, we need to look out at the horizon and wonder what is behind it.

The Sea is the personification of our curiosity, our urge to know everything. But also, our constant reminder that we will never manage to do so.

In the book I just finished reading, The Soldering Man, the author Patrik Svenson talks about Rachel Carson, an author in the 50s who played a major role in our understanding of sealife pollution and habitat loss. She also showed the world that a woman can become powerful and influential. A real legend to say the least. In one of her letters, she wrote to her friend Dorothy she talked about a story of a poor man who had two coins, for one of them he bought a loaf of bread for his hunger. For the other one, he bought a white Hyacinth for his soul. When I read this, I started crying. Something about a man who knows that the bread is necessary, but only a temporary aid for the moment. Meanwhile The Hyacinth is necessary for a whole other purpose. If you don’t buy the flower, if you let it die out in a bucket in a florist shop somewhere, then what even is the point of carrying on? Why live if you only do it to keep on living?

The Hyacinth is our reminder that life is worth living, not because of some instinct we have inside of us that tells us to do so, but because if you give up, it was all for nothing. We all need to find our own Hyacinth, and let it grow to become something to leave for the world when we are gone. The hyacinth is what shows the world that you at all existed. The Hyacinth is the single thing that keeps all the evil in the world from devouring us without leaving a trace behind.

The Hyacinth is The Sea. If you want to find it, get on a boat.

Fair winds!

Vidar Jägrud, portside