"Did you ever bathe in the hot blue water with your feet on a coral-reef strand, with starfish tickling the soles of your feet, with the bleached sand running beneath them, with the water melting into the sky in waves of sunshine, and your body melting into the sky in waves of sunshine, and your body melting into the water? Then your body has no burden, it wavers and washes in the moving of the sea, and your weightless feet, your water-washed thighs, your shadowed legs, your drifting hands, dissolve from you, and are born into the warmness and coolness and sweetness of the sea.
Every year in August we go by the launch to the islands in the Sulu Sea. Off the east coast they lie - Selangan, Pababag, Penampangan, Timbun Mata, Omadal, Bod Gaya, Bakbak, Bamban, Punupunu, Mata Manuk, Sipidan, Pulau Babi - we go there to the islands of Sulu Sea. Then again all words of beauty find a meaning. Then again all thoughts says, Men die; but this things live. And there, in the very perfection of nature, man also seems more what he ought to be".
Agnes Newton Keith in Land Below the Wind
