The Southern Ocean State of Mind
- Monish Khanderia
- Jul 27
- 5 min read
Updated: Aug 3
The Shoreline
Took the sun and moon to the other side of the world,
like rolling from one side of the bed to another.
A simple gesture, yet everything changes.
Jetlagged between two hemispheres,
I arrived at the edge of a continent
and the beginning of something unspoken.
The Southern Ocean met me with wind and water,
salt and silence.
Its horizon stretched like a wound too wide to stitch shut.
Its questions waited.
They hovered in the air like seabirds,
never landing, always circling.
Not yet ready to be asked.
Not yet ready to be answered.
That night, at the Docklands in Victoria,
twilight parked itself over the harbour.
The river held its breath.
I found a seat along the pier, my spine folding into it
like a letter sealed with longing.
The stars were yellow,
like Van Gogh’s over the Rhône.
My inner voice, blue.
The sky dark as your hair,
outlining the absence of you.
Passersby moved on.
The pier quieted by the emptiness.
I stayed, the wind stroked the river like one would
a lover’s face after wiping away a tear.
Memories of the the cackles shared in the past, docked and anchored
like boats in the harbour.
Saw the tears float up behind my eyelids.
They smudged the view of the harbour as I opened my eyes.
In this haze, I saw the city lights glowed like the lamps in your bedroom,
beneath which our skin, our bones, our breath
melted in the wild joy of each other.
And I remembered what Van Gogh said:
“There is a fire that burns deep inside me,
but no one stops to warm themselves.
They only see a wisp of smoke.”
The Currents
On the Great Ocean Walk,
I began to hear a voice echoing from the horizon.
A whisper between sea and self:
Listen.
Said the void:
Breathe in the scent of eucalyptus bark.
Feel the grains of sand shift under your steps.
Let the palette of sky and shrub rewire your eyes.
This was emotional attunement.
Not to any idea, but to raw sublimity of being. To what is. To now.
I questioned it:
If there are paths beneath our feet everywhere,
why do we spend our lives behind our heads as if imprisoned in thought?
Each step took me deeper in the question.
Beside the Southern Ocean,
its blue sky covering me
like a shawl knitted by grief.
I began to walk differently.
And something in me softened.
I began to walk not as a body
trailing thoughts like tattered flags,
but as ocean.
As unbending currents.
As gentle and kind shrubs offering shade to passerbys.
As incandescent grain of sand holding the weight of everyone's who ever had a real heartbreak.
As air brushing my hair.
As sunlight warming me where once there was only pain.
The world does not pause.
It flows forward like tides,
indifferent to your wounds.
But in that forward motion,
you can still choose presence.
The Depths
At Lorne beach, another night unraveled.
The moon hid behind a blanket of clouds.
The ocean and I spoke in whispers about the incarnation of presence,
of the mind that connects us all to a frequency,
of a now-ness in our lived experiences.
As I strolled across the cold sand,
a luminous orb floated above the horizon.
It couldn’t be what I thought it was.
It glowed with the colours of fire.
A sun disguised as moon.
Logic rushed to name it.
To contain it.
To define what my eyes saw.
And failed.
It was the Moon, yes.
But unlike any before.
It felt as though it had embraced the Sun.
Had held it in a quiet, infinite hug.
As if it remembered what we forget:
They are one. Formless.
Light and warmth folded into each other.
That night, a peculiar existential kindness entered me.
It wasn’t triggered by event or thought.
It simply was.
An openness that held me.
I surrendered to awe.
The kind my kitten 'Amrin' felt
when I lift him up into my arms,
wide-eyed, thrilled, safe.
We’re all fighting quiet wars.
Mine has been the size of collapsing stars.
Yet in the impossibility of it all,
I found possibility.
This kindness extended
to those I love
and those who harmed me.
And I asked:
What is the true test of kindness?
Is it not when it breaks its own boundaries?
When it holds every version of you: past, present, yet-to-come?
That night at Lorne,
I felt a new definition of beauty tattoo itself onto me.
Not colour, shape or form,
but the surrender to unknowing and uncertainties,
like the ones that cause all sense to break down and rebuild into a form.
Beauty is,
A form of compassionate curiosity for what is.
The moment of giving up the survival pattern to make stories that only serve you.
The ceasing of our mental automaticity and the silence after that you smile at.
The liminality of being both broken and becoming.
The tear in your eye that catches smudges all the colours and shadows in your visual field.
The turning inward so deep you reach your own brutal end where you then become truly free.
The breaking point that births compassion.
The interlocking of eyes and the shared breath of lovers reuniting after time apart.
“Beauty is a state of both deep attention and self-forgetting.”
-David Whyte
And in that state, I began to wonder,
not just about the world, but about me.
Where did I come from?
What was I becoming?
These questions didn’t arrive as thoughts
but as quiet inscriptions etched into the ocean floor of my soul.
The road to becoming is never clearly built.
It is an ambiguous construction,
a coastline carved by memory and time.
But I noticed that the beginning of this road,
like the start of any tide,
was marked by awe.
The awe of being here.
The awe of still breathing.
The awe that glows
even when your eyes are closed.
It lived in the smallest grain of sand
and in the towering limestone spires of the Twelve Apostles.
It lived in the landscapes around me,
and in the wild, undiscovered ones within me.
Was this, I wondered,
the panoramic birthplace
of every awe and wonder there has ever been,
and ever will be?
As I continued down that inner road,
new companions joined me:
Sincere honesty in the passenger seat,
and inquiry at the wheel,
steering me not toward answers,
but toward new ways of thinking, knowing, and being.
And when the road disappeared?
When I strayed off-map and off-path?
It wasn’t peril.
It was grace.
The breakdown of sense-making
and the beginning
of simply being.
The Return
The Southern Ocean never gave me answers.
Only questions, tides, and wind.
But maybe that’s all I needed.
I no longer search for resolution
in the linear, grinding gears of thought.
The fire inside me is no longer hidden smoke.
It is wind.
It is salt.
It is breath across the surface of water.
On the last day at dusk,
I stood where land meets sea,
the sky bruised with bright sunlight and the moon,
and I knew.
I’ve become a shoreline.
Not one thing or another,
but the quiet threshold where opposites meet
And touch,
And break,
And return.
The ocean never offered me answers.
But it offered me presence.
And maybe,
that was the answer all along.
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