beneath the floor
Come with me to the ocean floor, for if I told you where I’m really taking you, you might, in disbelief, refuse to hold my hand.
We begin on a simple boat, greeted by an effervescent crowd of flies. My annoyance is instantaneously quelled as the gratitude essence thrumming my awareness renders even their excitement tapping my body and flocking my air space as an honor of being utterly desired and welcomed.
In a momentary semblance of stillness, the boat teeters about along the rippling floor which upon a mere dive becomes a gleaming ceiling.
In the bathy surface of the water, among slants of sunlight filtering in like smooth blades, alien debris floats along. Translucent bodies, visible only to the lucky or the keen of sight. And their shockingly electric bodies. Stinging flesh, tangible only to the unlucky and the tender skinned.
Schools of fish nibble among the subtle flesh of these infinitesimal bodies. The hairs on my arms and legs too catch and comb these beings of the nano world of ocean dust.
Among them, bubbles occasionally emerge from the depths, and toss coin like as they rise to land only in complete mergence with the air beyond this ever rippling roof.
A lone sea turtle rises in its own time, like the bubbles, to fill its lungs with this oxygenous necessity. Bobbing and breathing for a moment, it bows its head and paddles forth once again to drift and exist along the ocean floor.
I follow, not too close, and enter the song of the corals. The clicking and ticking soundscape of the coral laden rocks is palpable to my ears before it is visible to my eyes. Catching my sight as I approach this singing outcropping, glowing blue fish, opalescent lapis in their adornment, sparkle like gems among the others.
I can see now, I am myself a member, a paddling pulsating body, swarming the reef among the gill-bearers. Our aquatic crowd imitating, in its own originality, the swarm of flies who had greeted me only moments ago.
Sharks navigating the three - and perhaps more - dimensional depths. sending mild waves of excitement through my body as they sniff, in some fashion, their way forth, silvery skinlike body following their leading nose in graceful writhes.
My eyes slide now to the nets of light casting down from the sun on the other side of this body of water. Purling and flickering in webs of momentary geometry, whisking away after a while as a cloud crawls to the forefront of the overhead sky, seeming a world away from where I float.
It is this paradoxical notion of worldliness and other-worldliness which has me feeling suspended here, more than even the buoyancy of my flesh in this saline sea.
Rising to the surface I feel as though I am returning to the world from which I come. And yet, I can feel in the primordial sameness of my being to all who dwell in this ocean, that from a time long before memory, I too come from this world, from the waters.
And as I linger to wrap my mind around the possibility of coming from two seemingly separable worlds, the clicking - this time inaudible as it comes not from the corals but from the neuronal networks within my own skull - of awareness occurs within and reminds me that these worlds are of course one in the same.
Aboard the swaying boat once again, bound back for land, we glide across the plane which seems to separate the world in two.
The plane which signifies a shift in dominant element, but does not fundamentally otherize the interconnected and interdependent biospheric oneness of which we all, from seemingly disparate worlds, are in fact wholly united and integrally embedded. Acting in unison, inconceivably as it may be from the narrow lens of individuality, as one. One larger flesh, floating itself a body, like opalescent dust, in a space scape, a cosmic sea. One world, perhaps among many, that we all together are.
