Lost at Sea: Childish Meditations

By: Jasmine Nihmey Vasdi

In June of this year, I found myself peering at the tip of the Atlantic, crabs and jellyfish crowding my feet. Behind me were rolling dunes, the only whispers of mountains in The Netherlands, filled with blown and tangled grass, set against a soundtrack of mating birds.

As far as my eyes could take me, I could make out the horizon, littered with fishing boats and a couple handfuls of sailboats but besides that, only open sea. The sand stretched past me on either side and seemed endless. I was in a rare patch of solitude in such a dense country and I fully thrived in those few moments. It was a weird thrill on par with standing at the tip of a cliff; there is no safety net past that feeling, but for a moment, you can catch the deepest breath you've ever taken before fear settles in and you realize your vulnerability. That odd threshold of tension.

I heard my partner's feet tumbling down the dune above, felt his camera gently shoved into my hands with a grin as he slid into the cool waters unafraid of the jellies. My eyes gazed over his giddy reborn childish head bobbing through the licks of sunlight on the slow waves.

Clicking through several scenes on the camera, I pinched the damp sand with my toes and skipped over a content pile of broken shells to gently rip off a few large chunks of grass. Braiding grass brings me back to my childhood the same way swimming in a quiet sea does for my partner. I looped the knotted turf around my left big toe and began weaving three by three by three to create a thicker braid against the backdrop of the sun, still high at 19:00, watching over the water.

Life has been slow like this for us lately. Faced with the reality that for the second year in a row we will be unable to visit our home country, we’ve fully embraced spring in NL. We moved to a livelier neighbourhood and rejoiced in finding the garden houses in a nearby park, where there seemed to be an endless abundance of flowers rolling out through the coldness of May and sudden dry sun of June.

For the full moon a few weeks ago, we drove out to a sculpture park by the beach in The Hague, the clouds were so dense we couldn't see the moon but through the dunes, the sunset hit like pink lightning. We poured bowls of tea and watched as the pink began to dance periwinkle, then tangerine, until it was swallowed back up by the clouds. It's been a scary year for most of us. Unpredictability has settled in for the long-term and I am learning to be okay with that. As the world unwinds from the events of the past year and faces the challenges of a fractured society and planet, I hope we can find stillness in nature. The kiss of your fingertip on neighbourly hedges during your strolls, walking barefoot through even the tiniest park in your vicinity, anything that frees you, even if just for a moment. To release the air in your belly that we all tend to hold onto too tightly.