world oceans day 2013

WOD Theme for 2013: "Oceans & People"

World Oceans Day 2013: Promises to the Ocean


Crazy Cris announces her 5^th Ocean Blog-a-thon for World Oceans Day! This year it's also a Facebook Event.


When I decided to go with this year's theme, "Promises to the Ocean," I found I already do all of the site's suggestions and then some—with the exception of a reusable water bottle, because I don't routinely carry a water bottle unless I'm hiking in the desert.

Originally I planned to design a poster for World Oceans Day, but got only as far as a Facebook timeline banner/cover photo that I'm using it as a promises prompt.

I promise to do whatever I possible can to help everything I pictured thrive: sandy beaches; grasses, wooden fences; dunes; places to walk, dream, and tumble. A shore where tides can ebb and flow. A blue, unpolluted sky with clear, clean, easily breathable air. Seas, oceans, rivers, waterways, streams, all healthy enough to house and sustain sea creatures who make their homes in shells.

Won't you join me?



Here are my posts for
• World Oceans Day 2012

and for
• World Oceans Day 2011

world oceans day 2012

Today is world oceans day 2012; WOD happens every year on 08 June. A few facts: water covers almost 75% of earth's surface—70% is in oceans. Only 3% of the planet's water is freshwater, groundwater is about 2% with most of the rest in frozen glaciers and ice sheets. Our human bodies are 60% water; 70% of our brain is water.

WOD Theme for 2012: "UNCLOS @ 30"

UNCLOS is United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea
Again this year CrazyCris is holding an Oceanic Blog-A-Thon. Youth is the official Blog-A-Thon topic, but anything ocean-related is welcome. Given that Facebook friends Tara, Brent, and Lance all have written about the physical geography that has helped shape their lives, what better prompt than World Oceans Day to nudge me to do something similar? Just as their experiences on the land continue to influence Lance, Brent, and Tara, my early environments and the geography where I now live continue to shape me. My post for World Oceans Day 2011 tells part of my love story with the ocean; last year I mentioned some places and spaces and this year I'll say a little more about...

...sensory memories, sensuous currents

Concrete, cement, urban decay and decline were a huge part of my early years. Often in sorrow, sometimes tears, I'd walk past yet another fire-gutted building, one more boarded-up house. Yet still I could walk outside, notice it'd been raining, the ground was muddy, and the air smelled like hope. "Like hope" because carrying scents of brine and beach, a ocean breeze drifted my way. Oceans began Planet Earth's history, they've lived its history, the oceans have been there through good times, bad times, changing times, times of death, and times of resurrection: oceans "know!" In another early memory I'd stand on the pier as they offloaded fresh catches of fish. Those fish smelled strongly like stereotypical "ocean" and brought along with them hints of future feasts that would carry a sea savor in a mouthful of pan-fried fish. Even if today's not exactly wonderful, there's something new and different on the way and, in fact, a pleasure that's repeatable as long as we carefully care for the waters and oceans.

Forever whenever I've lived on the coast, walking along the beach - my feet sinking deep into wet sand, seaspray splashing onto my face, a salty tang on my tongue - brings me to where the ocean has been, and every drop of water has been everywhere. On Malibu West or Malibu East, La Jolla Shores or Anywhere Shores, I feel, experience, and learn for myself stories the ocean has lived. In any season, driving up the coast alongside the Pacific on my left or the Atlantic on my right as sunshine dances off shimmering tealish, greenish, blueish surf also helps me identify with the history of the ocean, the history of this planet. As abandoned as I feel, and as much as abandonment by humans has been too much the story of my life (sadly not unique to me), the ocean assures me I belong to history and I am not alone.

Whether driving or walking, biking or riding the AmTrak (a new and recent experience!) up the shore, a classic roar of waves breaking at high tide or during a storm, a noisy raucous seagull symphony fills my entire being and assures me there is something greater than and more than myself. Water is the womb of earth's creation; water is the womb of our first creation and of our recreation in baptism. In baptism we identify with this planet's history and with salvation history. The story of the people of God ranges from deeps of the first creation, to Noah's flood, to water splashing from the exodus rock, to the river that bounded the promised land, the river where John baptized Jesus, to rivers of the new creation with countless instances of healing, reviving, salvific streams in between. After all these years I still feel home in the cement, concrete, even in the decay and sometimes decline of the inner city, but those ocean waters own me in ways no human-constructed environment can, and I belong—you belong. We belong!

Saturday, 09 June: CrazyCris is back! And here's her official Oceanic Blog-A-Thon post. This post already has had a lot of visitors but I'll repost on Facebook and retweet, too; most likely there will be more blogs in the thon over the next few days, so please visit Cris!

world oceans day 2011

WOD Theme for 2011: "Our Oceans: greening our future"
CrazyCris is sponsoring an oceans blog-a-thon; happily I found out about it in time to blog for the official world oceans day, Wednesday, 08 June.

a lot of my life has been another day on the bay

I first saw light of day on an ocean bay beside the Gulf of Mexico and ever since then the ocean has been singing to my heart, capturing my longing for freedom and homecoming.

I love the desert and come to think of it, I love the city and the cities. In fact, I love cities and the city so much I minored in urban studies and would have majored in urban studies if I could have. I love the prairies and plains of the heartland but I need to know the ocean, any ocean, is close enough to smell, to visit, to walk alongside, to splash my feet in, to catch a fish taco or fish 'n' chips.

I have early memories of the Atlantic Ocean on Tampa Bay in coastal Florida, later on and later on again of chilly northern Atlantic waters that unquittably hug the vacation peninsula of Cape Cod (there's Cape Cod Bay...), a too-short summer alongside Nahant Bay in Nahant Massachusetts... driving up and down the south shore was a frequent escape when I lived in inner city Boston; during those years I often parked on Atlantic Avenue—"Atlantic," named after the ocean named after the legendary island, of course! There was Boston Harbor, the River Charles and a string of city beaches to visit. For a few years maritime history in the city of Salem surrounded me; during that time, how better to spend a summer Sunday afternoon than by driving up the north shore to the Atlantic fishing villages of Gloucester and Rockport?

In Dorchester, geographically and in population the largest Boston neighborhood, Dorchester Bay reached into a largest, bigger stretch of Atlantic Ocean and carried some heavy social and political history. For only a few days longer than a single month I lived south of Boston in the town of Hull; many late dark November afternoons, I'd stroll over to Hull Bay and wonder what was next.

Then there was and now there is the Pacific Ocean—no wonder they call it Pacific since it's placid most of the time. Oceana Pacifica's extensive length and wide breadth definitely are what "I hope you still feel small when you stand beside the ocean" in the song I Hope You Dance must refer to.

Most significantly, there's my other central, transformative experience of water that defines my every day—on the bay and everywhere—and every move: my baptism, the cosmic event in my life that replicates the history of this planet and the history of the people of God in every time and every place. On this blog I've written so much about water and oceans, about the rivers that end in oceans and define and create communities and individuals that become part of communities I won't say more at this time.

In Cornhuskers, Carl Sandburg included a poem called "Prairie" that concludes with:

I speak of new cities and new people.
I tell you the past is a bucket of ashes.
I tell you yesterday is a wind gone down,
a sun dropped in the west.
I tell you there is nothing in the world
only an ocean of to-morrows,
a sky of to-morrows.

I am a brother of the cornhuskers who say

at sundown:
To-morrow is a day.

An ocean of tomorrows has to mean all the histories of this planet the oceans have known, experienced, and carry in the ebb and flow of every tide. With vast oceans of tomorrows everything may be possible but just as each of us and every community needs to care for and love its people and its places, we need to steward and take care of every aspect of creation, especially the waters where life originated and without which nothing will be possible and there is no tomorrow of any kind, not another day on any bay, only long-gone by yesterdays.