Inspired by the Persian Poet Rumi (born September 1203)

Didn’t I Tell You? (The Ocean Speaks, Now)

Didn’t I tell you I am the Ocean and you are the fish?

You leapt and shimmered in my light and called your hunger destiny, your nets necessity, your forgetting progress.

I carried you before you learned to count. I fed you before you learned to take. My grasses were your bread, my drifting dust your unseen blessing.

You thought abundance was eternal because it was quiet. You thought my silence meant consent.

Now listen.

My fields have thinned. My invisible forests— the green fire of plankton, the breath-makers of the world— are fading.

Not because I am weak, but because you forgot how pastures work.

On land, you learned this long ago: grass must be tended, soil remembered, dust returned.

But at sea you pretended I was infinite, a bottomless bowl, a myth that feeds itself.

Still— didn’t I tell you?

I am not broken. I am hungry.

Not for pity. Not for guilt. But for care.

Return to me what the winds once gave. Let mineral dust fall again like memory. Let the gardens bloom where light and iron meet. Let my smallest workers rise— and the fish will follow, and the birds, and the rain.

I have not forgotten how to give. I am waiting for you to remember how to tend.

You are not outside me. You never were.

I am the Ocean. You are the fish.

And even now— I am telling you there is time.

Read more here https://russgeorge.net/2025/10/02/a-drop-in-the-ocean-turning-the-metaphor-of-the-minimum-into-the-maximum/