It is the same ocean.

If I stand on the edge of the great Pacific, stretch my hands outward in front of me and squint my eyes really hard, can I make out those islands in the sun?  Can I scan those 2,000 some miles to reach the golden sand beaches of Waikiki?  Can it be a finger stretch away from being just out of reach?
 

What beach is this? What sand is this?  What water is this?  What sky is this?

Dearest mind, one month ago this beach was Kailua.  This sand was coral that had been rolled gently along waves until it broke into tiny remnants of what was once a reef.  This water was tropical and blue.  This sky was the sun leaving behind the glows of another Hawaiian day.  But lovely heart, today this beach is Ventura.  This sand is years of rocky coast being churned over and over as it is pulled along the California byte system.  This water is cool and green.  This is the fog-quilted blue sky of Southern California.  Those islands in the sun are closer than 2,000 miles, those are the Channel Islands, not the Hawaiian Islands.

But look heart, look mind, look soul.  See this ocean?  See the grand Pacific?  See this musky green?  Remember that vibrant blue?  It is the same.  This is the same.  This is the Pacific, this is the same ocean.  This ocean has touched the shores of Oahu and caressed the sands of Japan.  This ocean has skimmed over reef in Indonesia, stopped for a visit in Australia and frolicked with penguins along Peru.  It has been cooled by the Arctic waters and Alaskan glaciers and warmed by South Pacific beaches.  This water is now here at your feet, as you stand on the beach in California.  This Pacific is no different than what it was anywhere else in the world.  This water is the Pacific, it may have been the Atlantic, dabbled in the Indian and spent time in the Mediterranean.  The single water molecule that has bobbed in this ocean may have sailed all seven seas.  Humans have put the names of the oceans on maps, but it is all one ocean.  One fluid system of water working together.  This is the Pacific, that is the Arctic, here is the great trenches and rises and plains and abysses.  But this is all the same ocean.

So if I stand on the edge of  the great Pacific and stretch my hands outward and squint my eyes really hard, yes...I can see those islands and all the other lands that this ocean has touched.  But if I stand on the edge of the Pacific and place my hands at my side and close my eyes....I am exactly where I need to be.  In this moment.  On this shore.  I have traveled with this ocean, with all the oceans, with all the water.  I have been fluid and motionless and connected and distant.  I have worked like the gyre systems of these great seas.  I have sunk to cool off and rose to be heated by the sun just to move around this great planet of ours.  And now, like my beloved ocean, I can rest momentarily (or indefinitely) on a shore.  Like a message in a bottle or a coconut washed up on a remote landscape; this is where the ocean has brought me.

This is where I will stay until the next tidal change.

It is the same ocean after all.