TALES FROM THE SEA AND BEYOND - Mare Tranquillitatis

The calm before the next tide

"Each story leaves a door open. Because the ocean never answers all questions. Always leave some for the next tide."

When I wrote the first stories in this book, I never imagined that those characters would still be alive many years later. At first I thought that they would be independent stories to arouse the curiosity of some children about the sea, corals, turtles, sharks and so many extraordinary beings that inhabit the ocean. But something unexpected happened: the characters began to take me on new adventures; each story seemed to end... but, in reality, it had just begun.

It was then that I understood that the sea has a very particular way of telling stories. Like the waves, no story comes alone. Each one is born from another much more distant, each current connects places that have never been seen with each other, each creature keeps a secret that belongs to another story. Thus was born a small literary custom that accompanies this book from its first pages. And that pays homage to one of my greatest influences of my life as a writer, Michael Ende: '...but that is a story that will have to be told another time.'

That phrase was never a farewell, it was always an invitation; a door ajar, a promise that the ocean still holds much more than we can see. This third edition represents precisely that moment, it is not simply a re-edition, it is the visible beginning of a much larger narrative universe. A universe where each book will be a new sea. Each sea will have its own personality, each character will be able to return many years later, and where a children's story can become, over time, a novel, a documentary, a conference, an educational experience, a living laboratory or even a real conservation project.

Because imagination can also restore ecosystems.

Mare Tranquillitatis

Ancient observers of the Moon gave this name to one of its most beautiful places: Mare Tranquillitatis. The Sea of Tranquility. Paradoxically, there is no water there. However, it represents a place where human beings decided to take one of their greatest steps into the unknown. I chose this name for this edition because the real journey never begins in the middle of the storm, it begins when we find enough calm to observe, to listen, to imagine and to ask ourselves questions; in these pages the sea is not only a stage, it is a teacher, a laboratory, a mirror, and above all, a narrator.

If at the end of this book a child wants to know a new species...

Because no one protects what they do not know, nor does anyone truly love what they have never learned to discover.

This book is part of a much larger project that is just beginning. Each new volume will be named after a sea, each sea will represent a state of the soul, each state of the soul will open up new stories, and all of them will end exactly the same: leaving a question waiting for the next tide. Because the ocean never stops telling its stories. We are just beginning to hear them.