World Oceans Day: June 8, 2013

Evening, south coast, Jamaica.

Today is World Oceans Day, officially a United Nations-recognized day now (since 2009, although many countries have been celebrating it since the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, which was held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992.

Our island, standing in the Caribbean Sea, has not yet officially celebrated the day. I hope we will in the future. Meanwhile, I thought I would celebrate it in words and photographs. Unless otherwise stated, the photographs are my own. If you search my archives for “sea” or “ocean” you will find several earlier posts I wrote about the sea. Perhaps, in one sense, the ocean is more our Mother than the Earth. And perhaps Planet Earth should be called Ocean?

Sunset over Kingston Harbour.

Ocean is more ancient than the mountains, and freighted with the memories and the dreams of Time.

H.P. Lovecraft

My brother enjoying the seaside at Bosham, West Sussex in the UK – when he was little…

I was like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of Truth lay all undiscovered before me.

Isaac Newton

A cruise ship docked in Ocho Rios.

Our knowledge is like a little island in the great ocean of non-knowledge.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

Roll on, deep and dark blue ocean, roll. Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain. Man marks the earth with ruin, but control stops at the shore.

Lord Byron

The sea on a hot afternoon in May: Treasure Beach, St. Elizabeth.

Blue, green, gray, white or black; smooth, ruffled or mountainous; that ocean is not silent.

H.P. Lovecraft

“The sea is emotion incarnate. It loves, hates, and weeps. It defies all attempts to capture it with words and rejects all shackles. No matter what you say about it, there is always that which you can’t.”

Christopher Paolini

“What would an ocean be without a monster lurking in the dark? It would be like sleep without dreams.”

Werner Herzog

I have always been fascinated by the ocean, to dip a limb beneath its surface and know that I’m touching eternity, that it goes on forever until it begins here again.

Lauren DeStefano

Waves on the shore, Barbados.

Because there’s nothing more beautiful than the way the ocean refuses to stop kissing the shoreline, no matter how many times it’s sent away.

Sarah Kay

Prayer flags near a Hindu shrine in Waterloo, Trinidad.

I am the shore and the ocean, awaiting myself on both sides.

Dejan Stojanovic

Sunset over salt marsh, California.

Those who live by the sea can hardly form a single thought of which the sea would not be part.

Hermann Broch

Shearwater sighed, like a whale in the night.

Aldous Huxley

Two humpback whales near our boat on a whale-watching trip in Monterey, California. (In fact, three humpbacks spent about 20 minutes with us, diving and coming as close to the boat as they could).

Sea otter, Monterey, California.

I have seafoam in my veins, I understand the language of waves.

Le Testament d’Orphée

I wonder if the ocean smells different on the other side of the world.

J.A. Redmerski

Rocky shore, North Cornwall, UK.

It is beautiful, it is endless, it is full and yet seems empty. It hurts us.

Jackson Pearce

The view from our house, North Cornwall, on a rainy day.

My aunt at the seaside, Sidmouth, Devon. In the 1940s.