March 27, 2025

Between the Ocean and the Land - The Deeper Thinking Podcast

20 minutes

Between the Ocean and the Land

The Deeper Thinking Podcast

She walks along the tide line where the maps blur. Where the shore is no longer shore, and the ocean not yet sea. This is not a crossing, but an arrival into something unresolved. Beneath the surface of things that almost become one another, there is a silence that is not empty. A stillness that asks to be heard.

Ambiguity is often treated as something to be resolved. A gap in understanding. A flaw in comprehension. But here, it is understood as environment—an entire perceptual and cultural landscape that asks not to be mastered, but inhabited. In this space, clarity is not the goal. What emerges instead is a form of presence: lucid, incomplete, and essential.

Touch, breath, ritual—these are not metaphors, but epistemologies. Maurice Merleau-Ponty argued that perception is not distant observation, but entanglement. Simone Weil described attention as a moral act—waiting without grasping, perceiving without possession. And in the work of Gloria Anzaldúa, the “borderland” becomes more than geography—it is a condition of knowing, a refusal of coherence imposed from without.

The cognitive discomfort of uncertainty is well documented. The mind’s need for closure is not merely psychological but ancestral. Yet beneath that impulse lies another: the ability to remain. In silence. In paradox. In a space that neither confirms nor denies. It is not a failure of will, but a form of devotion. The tension is real. But so is the possibility.

Not all things can be resolved. Some should not be. The architecture of experience is not always built for conclusion. The world may be more honest when it is allowed to remain unfinished.

Why Listen?

Ambiguity as perception — not failure

Certainty as power — and its cultural cost

Attention as resistance — when clarity is not possible

The philosophical and bodily stakes of unknowing

Further Reading

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The Visible and the Invisible by Maurice Merleau-Ponty — Phenomenology and the threshold between body and world. Amazon link

Gravity and Grace by Simone Weil — Fragments on attention, affliction, and spiritual refusal. Amazon link

Borderlands/La Frontera by Gloria Anzaldúa — Identity, language, and living at the edge of definition. Amazon link

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Abstract

This essay explores the philosophical and emotional significance of ambiguity by examining the space between binaries—between the ocean and the land, knowing and unknowing, self and other. Drawing on the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the spiritual ethics of Simone Weil, and the epistemic border work of Gloria Anzaldúa, it reframes ambiguity not as confusion but as a generative field of presence. Touch, ritual, perception, and breath are treated as forms of knowing that resist resolution. The essay moves through conceptual, sensory, and political layers of the in-between, asking what it means to remain with uncertainty rather than resolve it. It critiques the cultural demand for clarity and closure, while defending the ethical and aesthetic possibilities that arise from attention without grasping. In its closing movement, the essay proposes not-knowing as a sacred practice and a form of intellectual humility, asking whether some truths remain truest when left incomplete.

Bibliography

Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987.

Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968.

Weil, Simone. Gravity and Grace. Translated by Emma Craufurd. London: Routledge, 2002.

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