Diego did not know the sea. His father, Santiago Kovadloff, took him to discover it. They travelled south. The sea was waiting beyond the tall sand-banks. When the child and its father reached finally the sandy heights after long wanderings, the sea burst before their astonished eyes. The immensity and the brightness of the sea were such that the child lost its speech in its beauty. When at last he could speak, shaking and stammering, he entreated his father: “Please, help me look, daddy!”
(Eduardo Galeano, El libro de los abrazos, p. 3)

The child’s request, when shaken by the blue surprise of the unending sea, is beautiful expression of what we men and women can do for one another in the continued search that marks our existence. Help me look! You cannot look for me, cannot force me to look, cannot lend me your eyes, your ideas, your principles, your experience. But you can help me. And I ask you to give me that help.

You have already helped me when you have taken me along in your journey to the south, when you have crossed the sands with me, when you have set me in front of the sea and have remained by my side while I looked. But the unexpected task of looking at the sea is so huge that I keep needing your presence, your company, your hand on my shoulder, the assurance that you see what I see, and wonder at what I wonder. Help me with your witness that what I see is real, that it is there, that it has always been there and will continue to be after we leave, as you knew it was here when you brought me along. Help me with your remembrance and with your secret. And if you happen to know some beautiful verses of any poet on the sea, help me reciting them here to me, so that I too may know them, and may enjoy inside me what I see there outside. Help me to see the sea!

Life is immense, and when we look at it over the horizon, we lose speech. “Please, help me look.” You who live with me, who have walked ways I have not yet walked, who have seen sights I have not seen, who show already mirrored in your eyes the blue mystery of the depth and range of life, who know how to hold your peace before the sea and let its majesty enter you with echoes of eternity: Help me look!

I do not need to understand; I am not going to paint a picture; I do not want explanations; I am not going to take photographs or take notes. I do not want to think out or find reasons or measure depths or study tides. I only want to look. I want to open in full my eyes and my soul and all my senses and my whole body to see and sense and experience with my whole being the fascinating reality that spreads out in front of me. I want to fill my organism with the presence of the sea. I want to take it along with me, into the land, into my life, into my conscience, that the shores of my soul may be enlarged for ever.

I am not asking for help to walk, to work, to achieve, to succeed. I only ask for help to look. Help me to see truly all that comes to me on the outside with all I have with me on the inside; help me open myself in wonder; help me encompass in grateful look all that ocean which is life from shore to shore, from birth to eternity. Standing by my side on the shore of friendship, dear friend of my soul, Help me look!