I recommend the ocean, for almost all things. For all stresses and distempers, for disturbances and introspection and discovery.
It is undoubtably vast and impressive, large enough simply as a temperature sink to cool summers and temper winters. It is immense and seemingly unchangeable. And for some people — especially those seeing it for the first time — that is enough. The way it takes the whole horizon into itself, the way its ragged drum-beat of breaking waves almost never stops, the way those waves are both regular in arrival and irregular in size and effect — there is, quite simply, a lot for a first-timer to get lost in.
Watching a winter storm over the open ocean can be downright awe-inspiring: the size of waves and the shriek that the winds develop as they sprint over the open fetch of unbroken water can’t help but make anyone feel small and somehow insignificant.
But for me, the biggest wonder of the ocean is in its near-endless variation, large and small.
Particularly the small. The broad sweep of a high sea running into an open cove is certainly astounding, but sometimes, you also have to get down on one knee — or, if it’s warm enough, right down onto your hands and knees, and eventually, unless you’re too embarrassed, flat on your stomach.
Kelps and seaweeds — some edible, some not — share the the sea bottom first, each at their own preferred depth and location, and then share the tideline in a complicated status-less tumble, a mix that reveals little more than that all living things have a best-before date.
Look closer still and the mix is more involved and certainly more complicated: stray lumber scraps and old shotgun shells and random plastic, egg cases for creatures unseen and unknown, the failed houses of the snails and whelks and sea urchins. Maybe some styrofoam — perhaps pieces of shattered quartz stained with iron oxide or the green of copper.
There might be that sad shrug of a tide-abandoned starfish, wanting nothing more than to hitch-hike its way back to the sea. The grey smooth lozenges of stone may all seem to be the same, though the odd one might give up hidden worthless treasures in the form of golden cubes of pyrite.
Stepping away from the beach to the rocks, you might be able to clearly discern the unbroken line that separates the land lichens from the close-clinging ocean algae and small fan weeds. You might be able to align every found angle and shape with the sometimes pale, but always present, rule-straight horizon measure of the meeting of sea and sky.
Simply put, the sea can take away the tangled mess of your thoughts and fears, and set you straight into more precise and necessary directions: the need to be careful of the positions of your feet and the coefficient of downward angles and sea-slime. The way unchangeable lines woven deep into the rock separate and pull together again.
The way the beat of the waves feels oddly like your heartbeat just as you near sleep.
The way one insignificant-seeming slip could be your last.
So many ways for it to rush into you.
I recommend the sea. Wholeheartedly.