Yet our neighbor the sea provides the amplitude and even, being still relatively unaffected by human ownership, the regenerative power of what is both dangerous and undiscovered in the universe. All its shores are washed by a capacity. If it is constant in peril for us, and for its own voracious inhabitants, it is also beneficent as a medium for life. Those tidal rhythms, watery colors, and reflections are translated into living organisms whose uncounted numbers are assured by their vast and relatively temperate home. We only see a small part of those numbers, at least consciously, since sea water may be swarming with invisible life, but during spring, summer, and early fall, the sea’s bounty often reveals itself. Countless moon jellies for example, pulse through waters inland of the sea during the springtime or in Cape Cod Bay, where I have seen comb jellies in great profusion during late summer. Watching them, it is not only their primitive, brainless nature, or their numbers, that has seemed incredible to me, but their approximation to their environment. It has been estimated that jellyfish are 95 per cent water. Dried out, they resolve into almost nothing. How could such evanescent creatures be predators, killing and ingesting living organisms? When you see such transparent flower-animals it is even difficult to believe that they have the nerves and muscles to be able to pulse through the water; but their chemical balance, their physical responses have a direct relationship with the sea water, whose salts are in them. Salt water is a liquid medium for life, a blood that circulates through the creatures of the sea. So close is the association of the sea and its lives, though each species has its unique kind of locomotion, respiration, aggression, its own way of feeding and being food, joining in the employment of energy, that it is almost tempting to inquire whether the sea does not have an organic nature of its own. I will not get very far by suggesting that a medium and environment “knows” anything beyond what all nature knows, but this primal “mother” great provider and provided, has its own deep rights in the realm of being. In summer and into fall you can see thousands of small fish schooling in the shallow tidal edges of Cape Cod Bay, moving slowly until approached, when those closest to you swing forward, or run, rush, and circle as need be, the whole crowd sometimes escaping with a simultaneous, sideward sweep. They are all spontaneity, life on the run, endowed with limited attributes from the point of a “higher animal” but of strict extravagance in form and action, born of ocean waters. They suggest the incomparable, swimming out of range.