She flopped her hand into the water—the outrigger canoe was moving at a quick clip, urged on by the Trade Winds. She had made this passage many times before, and this explained her languid posture, slumped casually near the stern, the canoe barely wider than her hips. The wind pushed relentlessly on the sail; hand-hewn trunks arranged in a crab claw rig suspending a woven sail, as her ancestors had made since time immemorial. The outrigger counterweight, the ama—little more than a coconut tree trunk—raised up and took flight, further increasing the canoe’s velocity. It sliced over the small, smooth waves like a machete through a tuna. While one hand dragged in the water—the crisp Pacific combed by her fingers—the other loosely held a fibrous rope, which adjusted and trimmed the sails, maximising the little boat’s speed across the limitless tranquil turquoise that was spread out before her.
Clouds travelled above, running their own errands, and she used them—along with the ocean currents and bird life around her—to chart her course to her destination, a nearby atoll. At this pace, she would make landfall at dusk; just as many of the seabirds she was currently watching would begin returning to shore before the fall of darkness.
With the whooshing of water and the whistling of wind, she couldn’t help but be immediately present. Time dissolved; just her, a speck in the cerulean expanse. Her hand dissolved in the water; the separation between her and the watery depths seemed increasingly arbitrary. There was movement—a wave occasionally washed over the side, birds divebombed in the distance for lunch, a flying fish flew alongside—but nothing changed. How could it? All that has existed, and all that will exist, is as it is.
The horizon became inverted. Actually, or allegorically? Or perhaps it doesn’t matter? Sea overhead, the sky submerged; whales soared, birds swam. Blue stacked on blue. And yet, nothing had changed; except perhaps perception. To perceive—to attempt to understand—is to experience the illusion of change, the myth of separation and distinction. Ocean oscillating, cosmos churning; movement, and yet changeless. Awareness, the now—outside of thought, circumventing the thinking mind—oblivious to time, the measure of change. All that is, just has it has always been, still just is as it is.
