The Entire Ocean

This is one of my favorites from all the faces I made in May so far. I can’t really describe what I like about it. Maybe just that it turned out the way I hoped it would.

The quote says:

You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean.

When I first read this quote, I was struck by it. Reading it now, I am still struck by it.

I can’t put my finger on exactly what strikes me about the quote. Maybe the magnanimity of it. How enormous the idea of being the entire ocean sounds to me. As I imagined it more, it made me think about holograms. I remember, years ago, I learned in a human brain class how a hologram works differently than a picture.

If you were to print a photo on glass and then break it, each glass piece would have a part of the photo. If it’s a face, for example, a broken piece might have an eye on it or an ear, etc. But a hologram doesn’t work that way. If you break a hologram printed on glass, each broken piece has the whole hologram on it, just faded. So you’d see the whole face on each piece.

That’s how I thought about this quote. How we’re all the entire ocean. The ocean is made up of all of us. Each of us is a whole piece of it. Like a piece of a hologram. We’re not a part of the whole, we’re each the whole. All of the whole.

Something about that idea makes me feel whole, held, belonging.

It also makes me feel bigger, wider, all encompassing.

I like the idea of all of us carrying the whole inside of us. Not just a piece but the whole thing.

Isn’t that a lovely thought?