The One

It started with an inability to remember the latin names of the species I was looking at. I checked my gauge console and found I had fallen past the intended bottom for the dive. I was at -110 feet. I was supposed to stop at -90. I looked up and saw the other divers above me, on top of the reef. I'd fallen off the wall and onto a narrow ledge, and it had happened so quickly I wondered how it had occurred at all. Had I been "gone" a moment. I had experienced brief "absences" in my life. Perhaps it has happened again, I considered. I took a deep breath to make myself neutrally buoyant, looking back at my fins as I lifted off the sandy ledge top to make certain I did not destroy anything when I finned upwards.

As I lifted to the top of the reef and up out of the shadow of the wall, the sunlighted reef surface dazzeled before me. I looked down and my eyes found a condylactus anemone. It had a beautiful Peterson's cleaning shrimp in its arms. The shrimp was lashing its white antennae, inviting me to stop and allow her to clean me. I exhaled and took care that I crushed nothing as I descended to the reef top and extended my hand for the cleaner shrimp. She swam out of her anemone and onto my palm, long arms and pincers searching me for loose skin.

A jeweled damselfish came to inspect. It's bright yellow tail merged with the irridescent star-studded velvet cobalt blue of its body. It looked like a cosmos had come to visit. A smile strained around my regulator mouth piece and I felt a deep sense of love -- actually, it was more like adoration, upwelling from within my being. Everything is so beautiful and alive and precious... The dive master tapped his tank with his knife to get my attention and I pushed the cleaner shimp off my palm with a finger tip and inhaled. Lifting again and soaring on the liquid winds, I finned away to join the group, awestruck and filled with deep appreciation... Gratitude.

We came to a sand-chute cave in the reef spoke network and I saw a giant silver mackeral in the cave. He weighed more than I did and floated absolutely still, not moving a fin, in the water column in the shade of the cave walls. A giant richordia anemone flouresced in bright pink and green and I moved in to look at it, inverting, my fins in the water above me. It was the first I'd ever seen of one of them in the wild. I reached down and caressed it's bubble-like tentacles, feeling the mild sting of its stinging cells releasing into the spaces between my fingers where the skin was thin enough that they could penetrate. I smiled again in appreciation. Of course, you'd do that. You don't know that I love you...

Abiding affection welled into my eyes and I glaced around, watching the fishes darting out and eating one another and chasing each other out of terretory, and then the reef showed its Self to me: It was but one life with myriad inTarnations, each believing themselves to be separate and yet each was wedded inextricably to all of the others. It was but one Life, one system, looking back at me with the same appreciation that I felt for it. The others in my group were far away and, my heart full of lightness and joy, I finned off to join them lest I be a problem. I did a little tumble in the water column, turning a flip or two in joy and then realized I didn't want the dive master to realize I was "narced", so I reverted to being more staid. But my eyes welled with love as I looked at the other divers waiting for me in patience as they prepared to ascend, their hands folded, their legs relaxed and limp.

I caught up to my husband, Bob and his mahogany eyes shown with affection as we caught each others' gazes. He popped the regulator out of his mouth and puckered up so I popped my regulator out and we smooched around our facemasks before ascending hand in hand. "Why'd you do that?" I asked when we had degeared on the boat. "Your eyes were so full of love," he sighed. "How could I not?"