Another massive result of the devastating storm that hit the entire South coast of Africa last week, was the washing up of what looks like millions of shell creatures onto my normally soft white sandy beach. I call it collateral damage.
I've only seen this happen once before a few years ago, also during a storm event, where the conditions were just such that it seems to affect this species of shell creatures that live under the sand on the shores of the beach, here along the coast of Southern Africa.
Usually this little part of paradise consists of long stretches of fine soft white beach sand stretching for miles. However, the recent storm caused such rough waves that they churned the sand up vigorously and dislodged perhaps the entire colony of shell creatures that live under the sand.
As a result, I arrived on the beach after the chaotic storm to see the normally gentle white beach sand covered with masses and masses of dead or dying shell creatures. Their carcasses - the hard white shells - were strewn all along the shoreline, making the beach not only difficult to walk on, but also smell really bad as the creatures living in their shells died and their bodies decomposed.
Now the majority of the 4 kilometer stretch of shoreline is covered with hard sharp shells, and it stinks rather badly of dead sea creatures. Normally these creatures, mussels they might be called, live just under the sand at the water's edge, and it's possible to dig down into the wet sand and pull them out.
Fishermen sometimes forage for them to be used as bait, or hungry people just eat them as they are, either by cooking them or by just breaking the creatures out of their shells and eating them raw.
As a lifelong vegetarian, at least since I became an adult, I've never eaten fish or animal flesh, and actually my entire life - despite only ever living by the sea - I've never liked eating any fish or sea life of any sort. It instinctively disgusted me. Not only the awful taste and smell, but primarily the cruelty of killing. I'm instinctively repulsed by it. But some people don't have that sentiment or compassion, and are maybe really hungry, I don't know.
So now for only the second time this decade, more or less, the soft sandy beach has become a graveyard for almost an entire species, by the look of it anyway. These mussels now lie rotting away, while the seagulls feast on their carcasses.
In the ancient Sanskrit Veda texts of India, it explains how in this material world one living entity is food for another. And I see how for living entities to survive, some others have to die. Live is dependent on death. And that to me clearly indicates that this is a tragic reality in which we live. Life on earth cannot prevail unless fed by death. Someone has to die to become food for the rest to live.
You can't escape it. Therfore life on Earth is designed to be tragic. There's no win-win scenario. It's win-lose. I personally am disappointed by that and therefore will never be content on this planet. I may be able to refrain from killing by becoming vegetarian, practicing "ahimsa" or non-violence, but most humans don't have the same awareness or sensitivity to death or violence upon other life. Mostly due to lack of education and bad role models.
And animals will still have to kill to survive, so this planet is unfortunately one based upon death as the food for life. It's not ideal. Still, I call my little beach paradise because it's the closest I can get on the planet to my goal. The goal however is ultimately not of this world of death, but elsewhere.
What to do? Such is life. Gita also says that a wise person dies not lament for the living or the dead. The aware person realizes that Earth is a place of birth, disease, old age, and death. And therfore does not find this to be the ideal place. It's a cruel world. Nature is red in tooth and claw, as the poet said once.
And therefore the self aware soul may want retreat from the world of death and meditate on attaining the higher realms upon leaving this body. The Sanskrit Veda texts describe other realms - you might call it heaven, or the afterlife, or the spirit world, where there is no death, only eternal blissful life. That appeals to me more than the life on this planet. We all have different realizations I guess. Mine are based on my intuition, common sense and also study and knowledge. Both feet are on the ground but my reach is for the stars and beyond.
What about you?
Photos my own. Written and published via my mobile device onto the Hive blockchain from the beach.