the sea

From the start of 2009, I've noticed a certain motif that stalked me through my life, appearing in music I listen to and occasionally even in events of my life.

The sea.

Recently, I discovered for myself Isis, already mentioned in the previous post. One of their albums is called Oceanic and obviously the sea is a theme that appears through the entire album. Aside from that, I've noticed that I know a fair amount of songs that involve the sea. The first songs that come to mind are:

Amon Amarth - Embrace of the Endless Ocean

Iron Maiden - Ghost of the Navigator

Moonsorrow - Sankaritarina

Oceanlab - Ashes (in fact, their entire album is full of oceanic melodies)

After one notices something stalking him, a pattern that appears regularly, a natural thing is to become highly sensitive to similar patterns. I could find many more subtle references to sea and water in the music I listen to, but that'd just make for a long and unnecessary list.

Soon after I started being aware of the sea patterns, I found another major one appearing in my life. At the end of June, after my school year was over, I left for an Aikido summer camp with the Blacks (a story for another post, the Blacks are essentially an age group of Aikido youth that evolved into a social circle of friends) and it turned out the camp had a mariner theme (despite being in the middle of land, with no sea or any major body of water nearby). After I returned, I had set my mind on where do I want to go next in this summer. Rather obvious conclusion there, so... yeah.

The sea brings with it various associations and emotions. About 70% of the surface of Earth is covered in water. Seas are vast and seemingly endless once you swim out far from any land. They are much easier to navigate these days thanks to technology, but still can be very dangerous, especially when combined with bad weather. The sea has the potential to be a fun place to be at, but can also be dangerous, foreboding and lonely. Its endlessness can drive to despair if you lose hope of reaching the shore. The sea is often personified as a woman (a hint of it occurs in the album Oceanic).

In the human past, it was an especially dangerous and mystical place, full of legends and mysteries - in fact, it holds many mysteries to this day, in its darkest, most crushing depths, which even our machinery still has difficulties exploring. It's no wonder that the sea is a frequent theme - with so many stories you can tell of it, so many mysteries and folklore to explore and such a variety of emotions tied to it.