Underwater Life Quotes

The blond boy in the red trunks is holding your head underwater because he is trying to kill you, and you deserve it, you do, and you know this, and you are ready to die in this swimming pool because you wanted to touch his hands and lips and this means your life is over anyway. You’re in eighth grade. You know these things. You know how to ride a dirt bike, and you know how to do long division, and you know that a boy who likes boys is a dead boy, unless he keeps his mouth shut, which is what you didn't do, because you are weak and hollow and it doesn't matter anymore.

Anyone else feel like that? Like your life's a big act. Like you're trying to be a man when you're just a scared kid, trying to keep under control when you really want to scream, cry, maybe hit someone. Ever feel like you're breathing underwater, and you have to stop because you're gulping in too much fluid?

Still in my coat and hat, I sank onto the stair to read the letter. (I never read without making sure I am in a secure position. I have been like this ever since the age of seven when, sitting on a high wall and reading The Water Babies, I was so seduced by the descriptions of underwater life that I unconsciously relaxed my muscles. Instead of being held buoyant by the water that so vividly surrounded me in my mind, I plummeted to the ground and knocked myself out. I can still feel the scar under my fringe now. Reading can be dangerous.)

The trouble with drowning in the mess of your own life is that you're not in any shape to save anyone else. You can't be a lighthouse when you're underwater yourself.

If my life were a corny horror movie, and the heroine was lost and alone, trapped in an underwater cave, what would happen next? If you guessed, “She drops her flashlight, and it hits a rock and breaks, leaving her in utter darkness,” you would be right. But I bet you didn’t guess the part about an attack by a giant octopus.

How you do life is your real and final truth, not what ideas you believe.

Private Parts The first love of my life never saw me naked - there was always a parent coming home in half an hour - always a little brother in the next room. Always too much body and not enough time for me to show it. Instead, I gave him my shoulder, my elbow, the bend of my knee - I lent him my corners, my edges, the parts of me I could afford to offer - the parts I had long since given up trying to hide. He never asked for more. He gave me back his eyelashes, the back of his neck, his palms - we held each piece we were given like it was a nectarine that could bruise if we weren’t careful. We collected them like we were trying to build an orchid. And the spaces that he never saw, the ones my parents half labeled “private parts” when I was still small enough to fit all of myself and my worries inside a bathtub - I made up for that by handing over all the private parts of me. There was no secret I didn’t tell him, there was no moment I didn’t share - and we didn’t grow up, we grew in, like ivy wrapping, moulding each other into perfect yings and yangs. We kissed with mouths open, breathing his exhale into my inhale - we could have survived underwater or outer space. Breathing only of the breathe we traded, we spelled love, g-i-v-e, I never wanted to hide my body from him - if I could have I would have given it all away with the rest of me - I did not know it was possible. To save some thing for myself. Some nights I wake up knowing he is anxious, he is across the world in another woman’s arms - the years have spread us like dandelion seeds - sanding down the edges of our jigsaw parts that used to only fit each other. He drinks from the pitcher on the night stand, checks the digital clock, it is 5am - he tosses in sheets and tries to settle, I wait for him to sleep. Before tucking myself into elbows and knees reach for things I have long since given up.

It turns out the real you is a quilt, made up of the light and the dark. The life you’ve lived in sunshine and your shadow life, stretching underneath the surface of your mind like a deep underwater world, exerting invisible power. You are a living, breathing story made up of the moments in time you cherish, all strung together, and those you hide. The moments that seem lost. Until the day they’re not.

However, narrating what you remember, telling it to someone, does something else. The more a person recalls a memory, the more they change it. Each time they put it into language, it shifts. The more you describe a memory, the more likely it is that you are making a story that fits your life, resolves the past, creates a fiction you can live with. It’s what writers do. Once you open your mouth, you are moving away from the truth of things. According to neuroscience. The safest memories are locked in the brains of people who can’t remember. Their memories remain the closest replica of actual events. Underwater. Forever.

All one's actual apprehension of what it is like to be a woman, the irreconcilable difference of it—that sense of living one's deepest life underwater, that dark involvement with blood and birth and death—could now be declared in valid, unnecessary, one never felt it at all.

It's funny isn't it, how everything's changing all time. Nothing stays still.

Some things get lost others return. That is how it is: the way of things.

I’d like to be that turtle, underwater, quiet, no one around. What a fucking peaceful life that turtle has.

I'm not sure I'll ever know the meaning of life or what comes for us after death, but I know it's more than the hysteria people make it out to be. It's about freeing your soul when no one else can; turning thirty and still feeling like you're seventeen. It's about taking chances on a whim, embracing the rain during the storm, and smiling so damn much that you start to cry. It's never regretting, never forgetting, and always being. It's kissing underwater and touching in the dark. Loving even when you think it's emotionally impossible and surviving someway and somehow. It's about living life with a full heart and an overflowing glass. I live life on the edge. I dream, I care, and I belong. I know there's a here and now. I know that I want it.

Writing is like breathing underwater. It's really hard to do unless you can imagine yourself a nice set of gills.

Change & transformation. That kind of magic.

There are lots of different ways grown-ups disappear. It's lonely being the one left behind.

Because that's what you do when something terrible happens. You go over and over every little thing, looking for clues, trying to find a pattern and a way to make sense out of the muddle and hurt.

The trouble with drowning in the mess of your own life is that you’re not in any shape to save anyone else. You can’t be a lighthouse when you’re underwater yourself.

You're not really in control, not with this falling-for-people stuff. You don't plan who you're going to fall in love with. It's all random - chance accidents of time and place.

Something, most certainly, happens to a diver’s emotions underwater. It is not merely a side effect of the pleasing, vaguely erotic sensation of water pressure on the body. Nor is it alone the peculiar sense of weightlessness, which permits a diver to hang motionless in open water, observing sea life large as whales around him; not the ability of a diver, descending in that condition, to slowly tumble and rotate in all three spatial planes. It is not the exhilaration from disorientation that comes when one’s point of view starts to lose its “lefts” and “down” and gains instead something else, a unique perception that grows out of the ease of movement in three dimensions. It is not from the diminishment of gravity to a force little more emphatic than a suggestion. It is not solely exposure to an unfamiliar intensity of life. It is not a state of rapture with the bottomless blue world beneath one’s feet…it is some complicated mix of these emotions, together with the constant proximity of real terror.

Do you ever think about the ocean?" Nick asked me. "What about it?" I said. "Like what could live down there? Like how there's as much life down there as up here? Maybe more?" "God Lives Underwater," said someone. "That's the name of a band. They're awesome." "But seriously," Nick said, "it's like an alternate universe. Right here on our own planet." "Right here, a hundred feet from us," said Sheila. "Right here in my hair," said one of the girls who had swum, pulling some sea gunk out of her wet hair. Everyone laughed quietly at that. Nick drank his beer. The wood crackled as it burned. We all stared at the black ocean.

This idea that grace will cause people to sin without restraint is from the pit of hell. You cannot be under grace and not be holy any more than you can be underwater and not be wet! It is being under grace that gives you the power to live a victorious life.

But I think it is a hopeful story. Is not some underwater paradise preferable to a life of poverty and incest and violence?

There, at a depth to which divers would find it difficult to descend, are caverns, haunts, and dusky mazes, where monstrous creatures multiply and destroy each other. Huge crabs devour fish and are devoured in their turn. Hideous shapes of living things, not created to be seen by human eyes wander in this twilight. Vague forms of antennae, tentacles, fins, open jaws, scales, and claws, float about there, quivering, growing larger, or decomposing and perishing in the gloom, while horrible swarms of swimming things prowl about seeking their prey. To gaze into the depths of the sea is, in the imagination, like beholding the vast unknown, and from its most terrible point of view. The submarine gulf is analogous to the realm of night and dreams. There also is sleep, unconsciousness, or at least apparent unconsciousness, of creation. There in the awful silence and darkness, the rude first forms of life, phantomlike, demoniacal, pursue their horrible instincts.

The New Testament called it salvation or enlightenment, the Twelve Step Program called it recovery. The trouble is that most Christians pushed this great liberation off into the next world, and many Twelve Steppers settled for mere sobriety from a substance instead of a real transformation of the self. We have all been the losers, as a result—waiting around for “enlightenment at gunpoint” (death) instead of enjoying God’s banquet much earlier in life.

Thomas Merton who said: “The will of God is not a ‘fate’ to which we must submit, but a creative act in our life that produces something absolutely new, something hitherto unforeseen by the laws and established patterns. Our cooperation consists not solely in conforming to external laws, but in opening our wills to this mutually creative act.”5

Momentarily drained of lust, he stares at the remembered contortions to which it has driven him. His life seems a sequence of grotesque poses assumed to no purpose, a magic dance empty of belief. There is no God; Janice can die: the two thoughts come at once, in one slow wave. He feels underwater, caught in chains of transparent slime, ghosts of the urgent ejaculations he has spat into the mild bodies of women. His fingers on his knees pick at persistent threads.

It's a good-bye, so I hug her back, breathing in the tangerine shampoo that I will associate with her forever, remembering how we used to shower together in her tiny blue-tiled bathroom after days spent by the pool, and how in the beginning, when things still felt easy and right, holding her close like this—underwater, in the sunlight in the quietest nighttime hours—was the best feeling in my life.

When religion does not move people to the mystical or non-dual level of consciousness9 it is more a part of the problem than any solution whatsoever. It solidifies angers, creates enemies, and is almost always exclusionary of the most recent definition of “sinner.” At this level, it is largely incapable of its supreme task of healing, reconciling, forgiving, and peacemaking. When religion does not give people an inner life or a real prayer life, it is missing its primary vocation. Let me sum up, then, the foundational ways that I believe Jesus and the Twelve Steps of A.A. are saying the same thing but with different vocabulary:   We suffer to get well. We surrender to win. We die to live. We give it away to keep it.   This counterintuitive wisdom will forever be resisted as true, denied, and avoided, until it is forced upon us—by some reality over which we are powerless—and if we are honest, we are all powerless in the presence of full Reality.

What is life in a house underwater?

I moved through my getting-ready-for-work routine like I was underwater.

It turns out the real you is a quilt, made up of the light and the dark. The life you’ve lived in sunshine and your shadow life, stretching underneath the surface of your mind like a deep underwater world,

things were created by God and for God, no exceptions. Every note of music. Every color on the palette. Every flavor that tingles the taste buds. Arnold Summerfield, the German physicist and pianist, observed that a single hydrogen atom, which emits one hundred frequencies, is more musical than a grand piano, which only emits eighty-eight frequencies. Every single atom is a unique expression of God’s creative genius. And that means every atom is a unique expression of worship. According to composer Leonard Bernstein, the best translation of Genesis 1:3 and several other verses in Genesis 1 is not “and God said.” He believed a better translation is “and God sang.” The Almighty sang every atom into existence, and every atom echoes that original melody sung in three-part harmony by the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Did you know that the electron shell of the carbon atom produces the same harmonic scale as the Gregorian chant? Or that whale songs can travel thousands of miles underwater? Or that meadowlarks have a range of three hundred notes? But the songs we can hear audibly are only one instrument in the symphony orchestra called creation. Research in the field of bioacoustics has revealed that we are surrounded by millions of ultrasonic songs. Supersensitive sound instruments have discovered that even earthworms make faint staccato sounds! Lewis Thomas put it this way: “If we had better hearing, and could discern the descants [singing] of sea birds, the rhythmic tympani [drumming] of schools of mollusks, or even the distant harmonics of midges [flies] hanging over meadows in the sun, the combined sound might lift us off our feet.” Someday the sound will lift us off our feet. Glorified eardrums will reveal millions of songs previously inaudible to the human ear.

THE FORTRESS Under the pink quilted covers I hold the pulse that counts your blood. I think the woods outdoors are half asleep, left over from summer like a stack of books after a flood, left over like those promises I never keep. On the right, the scrub pine tree waits like a fruit store holding up bunches of tufted broccoli. We watch the wind from our square bed. I press down my index finger -- half in jest, half in dread -- on the brown mole under your left eye, inherited from my right cheek: a spot of danger where a bewitched worm ate its way through our soul in search of beauty. My child, since July the leaves have been fed secretly from a pool of beet-red dye. And sometimes they are battle green with trunks as wet as hunters' boots, smacked hard by the wind, clean as oilskins. No, the wind's not off the ocean. Yes, it cried in your room like a wolf and your pony tail hurt you. That was a long time ago. The wind rolled the tide like a dying woman. She wouldn't sleep, she rolled there all night, grunting and sighing. Darling, life is not in my hands; life with its terrible changes will take you, bombs or glands, your own child at your breast, your own house on your own land. Outside the bittersweet turns orange. Before she died, my mother and I picked those fat branches, finding orange nipples on the gray wire strands. We weeded the forest, curing trees like cripples. Your feet thump-thump against my back and you whisper to yourself. Child, what are you wishing? What pact are you making? What mouse runs between your eyes? What ark can I fill for you when the world goes wild? The woods are underwater, their weeds are shaking in the tide; birches like zebra fish flash by in a pack. Child, I cannot promise that you will get your wish. I cannot promise very much. I give you the images I know. Lie still with me and watch. A pheasant moves by like a seal, pulled through the mulch by his thick white collar. He's on show like a clown. He drags a beige feather that he removed, one time, from an old lady's hat. We laugh and we touch. I promise you love. Time will not take away that.

It wasn't gloom at all, really. There were lights and colors. If it hadn't been for the feel of the water gliding by against his skin he might have imagined himself up in the sky, with meteors and comets blazing past. But these were sea-things, shining in the dark, the luminous life that blazes beneath the southern sea. First he'd see a tiny twinkling speck, like a star, and it might have been next to his face or a mile away, in that immense, featureless void, with its faint hint of green. It would grow larger. It would turn into a radiant sun of purple or crimson or orange and come rushing at him, and swerve aside at the last moment. There were sinuous ribbons of fire that coiled into bright patterns, and there were schools of tiny fish that flashed by like sparks. Down below, in the deeper abyss, the colors were paler, and once an enormous shape blundered past down there, like the sea-bottom itself moving heavily. Pete watched awhile and then swam up. ("Before I Wake...")

Doc was collecting marine animals in the Great Tide Pool on the tip of the Peninsula. It is a fabulous place: when the tide is in, a wave-churned basin, creamy with foam, whipped by the combers that roll in from the whistling buoy on the reef. But when the tide goes out the little water world becomes quiet and lovely. The sea is very clear and the bottom becomes fantastic with hurrying, fighting, feeding, breeding animals. Crabs rush from frond to frond of the waving algae. Starfish squat over mussels and limpets, attach their million little suckers and then slowly lift with incredible power until the prey is broken from the rock. And then the starfish stomach comes out and envelops its food. Orange and speckled and fluted nudibranchs slide gracefully over the rocks, their skirts waving like the dresses of Spanish dancers. And black eels poke their heads out of crevices and wait for prey. The snapping shrimps with their trigger claws pop loudly. The lovely, colored world is glassed over. Hermit crabs like frantic children scamper on the bottom sand. And now one, finding an empty snail shell he likes better than his own, creeps out, exposing his soft body to the enemy for a moment, and then pops into the new shell. A wave breaks over the barrier, and churns the glassy water for a moment and mixes bubbles into the pool, and then it clears and is tranquil and lovely and murderous again. Here a crab tears a leg from his brother. The anemones expand like soft and brilliant flowers, inviting any tired and perplexed animal to lie for a moment in their arms, and when some small crab or little tide-pool Johnnie accepts the green and purple invitation, the petals whip in, the stinging cells shoot tiny narcotic needles into the prey and it grows weak and perhaps sleepy while the searing caustic digestive acids melt its body down. Then the creeping murderer, the octopus, steals out, slowly, softly, moving like a gray mist, pretending now to be a bit of weed, now a rock, now a lump of decaying meat while its evil goat eyes watch coldly. It oozes and flows toward a feeding crab, and as it comes close its yellow eyes burn and its body turns rosy with the pulsing color of anticipation and rage. Then suddenly it runs lightly on the tips of its arms, as ferociously as a charging cat. It leaps savagely on the crab, there is a puff of black fluid, and the struggling mass is obscured in the sepia cloud while the octopus murders the crab. On the exposed rocks out of water, the barnacles bubble behind their closed doors and the limpets dry out. And down to the rocks come the black flies to eat anything they can find. The sharp smell of iodine from the algae, and the lime smell of calcareous bodies and the smell of powerful protean, smell of sperm and ova fill the air. On the exposed rocks the starfish emit semen and eggs from between their rays. The smells of life and richness, of death and digestion, of decay and birth, burden the air. And salt spray blows in from the barrier where the ocean waits for its rising-tide strength to permit it back into the Great Tide Pool again. And on the reef the whistling buoy bellows like a sad and patient bull.

Right Relationship With Life Itself Gerald May, a dear and now deceased friend of mine, said in his very wise book Addiction and Grace that addiction uses up our spiritual desire. It drains away our deepest and true desire, that inner flow and life force which makes us “long and pant for running streams” (Psalm 42). Spiritual desire is the drive that God put in us from the beginning, for total satisfaction, for home, for heaven, for divine union, and it just got displaced onto the wrong object. It has been a frequent experience of mine to find that many people in recovery often have a unique and very acute spiritual sense; more than most people, I would say. It just got frustrated early and aimed in a wrong direction. Wild need and desire took off before boundaries, strong identity, impulse control, and deep God experience were in place.2

If the universe was a cold mechanism, if life was a journey from one empty blackness to another, he could not rant at God, because to do so was no more effective than screaming for help in the vacuum of deep space where sound could not travel, or like trying to draw breath underwater.

Do you know why the lotus is one of my favorite flowers?" I cocked my head to one side so I could see his expression. He shook his head. "This beautiful flower lives in the most vile, muddy water of swamps and bogs," I said and rubbed the smooth metal of the pendant between my fingers. He frowned. "No, seriously... the grosser the environment, the better," I said. "So let me get this straight. You like a flower that lives in disgusting places?" One of his eyebrows rose. "That ain't right." "No, I love this flower," I corrected. He glanced at me out of the corner of his eye, "Seriously?" "What?" You don't believe me?" "Sure, I believe you. It's just weird." "I'll tell you why, but only if you promise not to laugh," I said. He nodded. Taking a cleansing breath, I rested my head against the seat, closed my eyes, and took that scary first step. "This flower stays in the mud and muck all night long." I peeked at him without moving my head. His face had become set in the smooth lines of one who listens intently. "Then, at sunrise, it climbs toward the light and opens into a pristine bloom. After the sun goes down, the bloom sinks into the mire. Even though it spends the whole night underwater, the flower emerges every morning as beautiful as the day before." Smiling, I swiveled in my seat to face him. "I love this flower because it reminds me that we get second chances every day, no matter what muck life drags us through.

I told my therapist how I had been feeling this heaviness, more than my usual amount of stress and anxiety, as though I were moving through life underwater. "I've been hard on myself lately," I began. "I feel like I always have a long list of things I need to do, but I keep getting distracted doing useless things like watching TV or mindlessly scrolling through the internet. And at the end of each wasted day, I always ask myself "What is wrong with you? Why are you like this?" It's like...this crippling cycle of guilt and disappointment, and it always ends in anger towards myself for not being better.

Almost all divers wear goggles or a face-mask as without them the eyes are unable to focus underwater and everything appears blurred. This is because when a light ray passes from one medium to another – in this case from air (or water) into the eye – it is bent (refracted). This property is used to help focus the light rays on the layer of light-sensitive cells, known as the retina, at the back of the eye. The extent to which a light ray is bent at the surface of the eye is very much less in water than in air, which makes it impossible to focus the image on the retina. Maintaining an air space next to the eye, by wearing goggles or a face-mask, obviates the problem. But because the light rays will now be refracted by the glass/water interface of the mask, objects appear some 30 per cent larger and closer underwater than they do in air. It may be useful to remember this when listening to divers’ tales of giant sharks.

What's impossible to communicate, what you can't experience unless you're part of it, is the sensation of being in a real-life marriage. Even little chats seem to be floating in some kind of really ast liquid, and that vast liquid is the ocean of shared feelings and memories and shorthands, of understanding and misunderstandings between the couple-- their history ocean. More and more of their business tends to go underwater, and so even the important words feel only like individual waves popping up from that ocean. All that context, that history, and those impressions from real life that the couple logs and drowns in, it all washes over everything

I am tired of the lifeless tears. I’ve cried so many bitter tears of yesterday because tomorrow has never come. I am immune to salty tears as I drown in an ocean of tears over and over again. When will I be able to come up for air? Sadly, life dunks my head underwater again as I cry while tears are buried beneath my sheets at night.

In 1994, Karl Sims was doing experiments on simulated organisms, allowing them to evolve their own body designs and swimming strategies to see if they would converge on some of the same underwater locomotion strategies that real-life organisms use.5, 6, 7 His physics simulator—the world these simulated swimmers inhabited—used Euler integration, a common way to approximate the physics of motion. The problem with this method is that if motion happens too quickly, integration errors will start to accumulate. Some of the evolved creatures learned to exploit these errors to obtain free energy, quickly twitching small body parts and letting the math errors send them zooming through the water.

When a volcano lets fly or an earthquake brings down a mountainside, people look upon the event with surprise and report it to each other as news. People, in their whole history, have seen comparatively few such events; and only in the past couple of hundred years have they begun to sense the patterns the events represent. Human time, regarded in the perspective of geologic time, is much too thin to be discerned—the mark invisible at the end of a ruler. If geologic time could somehow be seen in the perspective of human time, on the other hand, sea level would be rising and falling hundreds of feet, ice would come pouring over continents and as quickly go away. Yucatáns and Floridas would be under the sun one moment and underwater the next, oceans would swing open like doors, mountains would grow like clouds and come down like melting sherbet, continents would crawl like amoebae, rivers would arrive and disappear like rainstreaks down an umbrella, lakes would go away like puddles after rain, and volcanoes would light the earth as if it were a garden full of fireflies. At the end of the program, man shows up—his ticket in his hand. Almost at once, he conceives of private property, dimension stone, and life insurance. When a Mt. St. Helens assaults his sensibilities with an ash cloud eleven miles high, he writes a letter to the New York Times recommending that the mountain be bombed.

When I was a kid, I used to watch that show, sitting on the couch in my pajamas and wishing more than anything that one day I'd just change into this other person. I thought that would explain everything. You know, about why I felt so different. Then I'd find out that my mother was really an alien or that I'd been bitten by a radioactive spider as a baby and it would all be okay because I'd be able to fly and see through walls.. But it never happened. I just went on being me my whole life, until one day I realized that all those superheroes were doing was fighting themselves, and that getting to breathe underwater or shoot fire from your fingers didn't really make up for being screwed up in the first place. It was just the consolation prize - you got the great costume and the invisible jet for being a loser in everything else.

I don’t have a lot of regrets in life, but one of my biggest is that when my son Kyle was about 10 and was proudly demonstrating how many laps he could swim underwater without taking a breath, I jumped in the pool and swam one more length than he did. It was an unthinking moment, and a great demonstration of the destructive power of competitiveness. I didn’t just show up my child; I risked damaging his self-confidence and our bond.

Ground zero is where the normal people live their lives, but not us. We live in the negatives so often that we begin to understand that life when the sun shines should be lived full throttle, soaring. The invisible tether that binds the normal people on their steady course doesn’t hold us in the same way. Sometimes we walk in sunlight with everyone else. Sometimes we live underwater and fight and grow. And sometimes …  … sometimes we fly.

I scarcely know how to describe that room. It became, in a way, every room I had ever been in and every room I find myself in hereafter will remind me of Giovanni’s room. I did not really stay there very long—we met before the spring began and I left there during the summer—but it still seems to me that I spent a lifetime there. Life in that room seemed to be occurring underwater, as I say, and it is certain that I underwent a sea-change there.

In fact, I would say what makes so much religion so innocuous, ineffective, and even unexciting is that there has seldom been a concrete “decision to turn our lives over to the care of God,” even in many people who go to church, temple, or mosque. I have been in religious circles all my life and usually find willfulness run rampant in monasteries, convents, chancery offices, and among priests and prelates, ordinary laity, and at church meetings.

A short lightning flash of white snow flew into the woods frightening the animals there a hare hops around the bird-cherry there a bobcat lies in wait for an underwater mouse puffed out its muzzle raised its tasseled tail mangy beast of prey to you woodpeckers and rabbits are as scrambled eggs to us only the oak stands paying no attention to anyone itself just recently fallen from the sky the pain not yet abated the branches had not drawn apart not a reproach nor an answer did I deserve oh my spurs seize me chop me and beat me right in the back right in the back oh he’s fast I thought I see before me the torah but no the lun a tic the lunatic of my words one thing I won’t repeat will not repeat my whole life through this is ladies and gentlemen ladies and gentlemen my attentive audience that leap the leap from the heights of treesongers down on to the boards of stone the tables of stone tables of oh giant Numbers.

The final part of the swim workout was “water harassment.” These days, the official, politically correct name for this training is “water confidence,” but harassment is a more accurate description. Water harassment is designed to train PJs to remain calm and effectively deal with underwater emergencies. This training also prepares students for the rigorous military scuba school later in the pipeline. As a result, PJs are exceptionally skilled and comfortable in the water.

Plodding slowly up the last few steps to the summit, I had the sensation of being underwater, of life moving at quarter speed. And then I found myself atop a slender wedge of ice, adorned with a discarded oxygen cylinder and a battered aluminum survey pole, with nowhere higher to climb. A string of Buddhist prayer flags snapped furiously in the wind. Far below, down a side of the mountain I had never laid eyes on, the dry Tibetan plateau stretched to the horizon as a boundless expanse of dun-colored earth.

As the trees died, their bodies fell into the swamps and accumulated underwater, being slowly entombed by sediment brought down by the rivers. Beyond the reach of oxygen and the normal processes of decomposition, their carbon-laden tissues, buried beneath mud and sand, were compressed and eventually became coal. Subsequently, over several hundred million years, plankton and algae that flourished in ancient seas and stagnant lakes have, on occasions, been buried at depth and turned into oil and inflammable gas.

Lots of people do not feel and do not care, deeply. They're the sea creatures who were born to swim in the shallows. And I think that they look at those of us who come from the parts of the ocean that's pitch black and deeper than the core of the planet and they feel fascinated. They're fascinated in the way we are fascinated with eagles or with vampires. They think we're unabashedly deep and beautiful and they feel like they want to try being that way, too. It's like a fascination for a mystical creature. But I have watched these kinds of people burn out before they ever reach that depth (not even close). They burn out because they just get so exhausted! You only have the set of lungs designed for the depths of the ocean, if you are the type of creature who was born in those depths. It's not a regimen, it's not a list of rules, it's not a succession of steps to get there. It's about anatomy. There are creatures for the shallows and creatures for the deep. It is nature's designer plan. And when these people burn out, they will have these outbursts wherein they lash out at you, as if they are exasperated at why you're a mermaid in the black of the seas, and if they could, they'd drag you into a glass tank and chain you up because they don't want that kind of beauty around them, outshining them. Feeling and living in the depths of life (caring so much it hurts, feeling so much it becomes painful) is a mystical, beautiful thing but it cannot be copied and it shouldn't be copied. Everyone has their place and you are going to drown if you can't breathe underwater.

The Lanyard The other day I was ricocheting slowly off the blue walls of this room, moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano, from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor, when I found myself in the L section of the dictionary where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard. No cookie nibbled by a French novelist could send one into the past more suddenly— a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp by a deep Adirondack lake learning how to braid long thin plastic strips into a lanyard, a gift for my mother. I had never seen anyone use a lanyard or wear one, if that's what you did with them, but that did not keep me from crossing strand over strand again and again until I had made a boxy red and white lanyard for my mother. She gave me life and milk from her breasts, and I gave her a lanyard. She nursed me in many a sick room, lifted spoons of medicine to my lips, laid cold face-cloths on my forehead, and then led me out into the airy light and taught me to walk and swim, and I , in turn, presented her with a lanyard. Here are thousands of meals, she said, and here is clothing and a good education. And here is your lanyard, I replied, which I made with a little help from a counselor. Here is a breathing body and a beating heart, strong legs, bones and teeth, and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered, and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp. And here, I wish to say to her now, is a smaller gift—not the worn truth that you can never repay your mother, but the rueful admission that when she took the two-tone lanyard from my hand, I was as sure as a boy could be that this useless, worthless thing I wove out of boredom would be enough to make us even.

This was the southern sea. The colors that fade when coral is drawn out of its element were garishly bright here, intricate and lovely labyrinths on the bottom. Among the coral, fish went darting; and overhead a sea-bat, a devil-fish, flapped slow wings past, its stingaree tail trailing. Morays coiled by, opening their incredible, wolfish mouths at him, and many-limbed crabs scuttled sidewise over the rocks and little sandy plateaus of the bottom. Groves of seaweed and great fans of colored sponges swung with hypnotic motion, and schools of tiny striped fish went flashing in and out among them, moving all together as if with a single mind. Pete swam down. From a cavern among the brown and purple rocks an octopus looked at him out of huge, alien eyes. Its tentacles hung and quivered. Pete swam away, hovering over an expanse of pale sand where the light from above shimmered and ran in rippling waves, his own shadow hanging spread-eagled below him. In and out of it many little creatures went scuttling busily on their underwater errands. Life here was painted in three dimensions, and there was no gravity. There was only beauty and strangeness and a hint of terror that sent pleasurable excitement thrilling through Pete's blood. ("Before I Wake")

In front of me girls were entering and exiting the showers. The flashes of nakedness were like shouts going off. A year or so earlier these same girls had been porcelain figurines, gingerly dipping their toes into the disinfectant basin at the public pool. Now they were magnificent creatures. Moving through the humid air, I felt like a snorkeler. On I came, kicking my heavy, padded legs and gaping through the goalie mask at the fantastic underwater life all around me. Sea anemones sprouted from between my classmates’ legs. They came in all colors, black, brown, electric yellow, vivid red. Higher up, their breasts bobbed like jellyfish, softly pulsing, tipped with stinging pink. Everything was waving in the current, feeding on microscopic plankton, growing bigger by the minute. The shy, plump girls were like sea lions, lurking in the depths. The surface of the sea is a mirror, reflecting divergent evolutionary paths. Up above, the creatures of air; down below, those of water. One planet, containing two worlds. My classmates were as unastonished by their extravagant traits as a blowfish is by its quills. They seemed to be a different species. It was as if they had scent glands or marsupial pouches, adaptations for fecundity, for procreating in the wild, which had nothing to do with skinny, hairless, domesticated me.

He thus didn’t find himself outside the limits of his experience; he was high above it. His distaste for himself remained down below; down below he had felt his palms become sweaty with fear and his breath speed up; but here, up high in his poem, he was above his paltriness, the key-hole episode and his cowardice were merely a trampoline above which he was soaring; he was no longer subordinate to his experience, his experience was subordinate to what he had written. The next day he used his grandfather’s typewriter to copy the poem on special paper; and the poem seemed even more beautiful to him than when he had recited it aloud, for the poem had ceased to be a simple succession of words and had become a thing; its autonomy was even more incontestable; ordinary words exist only to perish as soon as they are uttered, their only purpose is to serve the moment of communication; subordinate to things they are merely their designations; whereas here words themselves had become things and were in no way subordinate; they were no longer destined for immediate communication and prompt disappearance, but for durability. What Jaromil had experienced the day before was expressed in the poem, but at the same time the experience slowly died there, as a seed dies in the fruit. “I am underwater and my heartbeats make circles on the surface”; this line represents the adolescent trembling in front of the bathroom door, but at the same time his feature in this line, slowly became blurred, this line surpassed and transcended him. “Ah, my aquatic love”, another line said, and Jaromil knew that aquatic love was Magda, but he also knew that no one could recognise her behind these words; that she was lost, invisible, buried there, the poem he had written was absolutely autonomous, independent and incomprehensible as reality itself, which is no one’s ally and content simply to be; the poem’s autonomy provided Jaromil a splendid refuge, the ideal possibility of a second life; he found that so beautiful that the next day he tried to write more poems; and little by little he gave himself over to this activity.

Memories are powerful things. But—and this is important, my therapist said—so are the dark spaces. The things you choose, consciously or not, to repress. Always, they’re the things you need protection from. The too much: too terrifying, too shameful, too devastating. The things that, if allowed, would threaten the very core of who you’re supposed to be. It turns out the real you is a quilt, made up of the light and the dark. The life you’ve lived in sunshine and your shadow life, stretching underneath the surface of your mind like a deep underwater world, exerting invisible power. You are a living, breathing story made up of the moments in time you cherish, all strung together, and those you hide. The moments that seem lost.

Every person was a mystery […] It was as if each of us had another, deeper life than the one being lived. It lies underneath our ordinary days, our errands, the doing of dishes, the writing of letters, the making of money, like something moving, lobster-like, underwater. This only partially understood life (refused, often; banished, easily ignored) might be what we call the soul. The desire to know about it causes us to pray. But all the while, it’s moving toward something, as surely as we are advancing in our lives, through careers, marriage, children. Every now and then, this hidden life surfaces, as if to enact itself, to bring something to fulfillment. Often, this happens when it intersects with another’s […] it was like a glimpse of things in that peculiar, vivid light after a rain.

Crossover' is a word scientists use to describe dolphins' soaring over seas, their traveling so free and fast, so high-spirited and almost effervescent that their sleek bodies barely skim the waves. The suggestion of splashes from tail and pectoral leaves a luminous wake across the water. For these crossover miles, the dolphins, like their human terrestrial mammal kin, belong more to the element of air than the sea.... Held in [the dolphins'] fluid embrace, I pulled my arms close against my sides and our communal speed increased... Racing around the lagoon, I opened my eyes again to see nothing but an emerald underwater blur. And then I remembered what I had either forgotten long ago or never quite fully realized. This feeling of being carried along by other animals was familiar. Animals had carried me all my life. I was a crossover--carried along in the generous and instructive slipstream of other species. And I had always navigated my life with them in mind, going between the human and animal worlds--a crossover myself. By including animals in my life I was always engaging with the Other, imagining the animal mind and life. For almost half a century, my bond with animals had shaped my character and revealed the world to me. At every turning point in my life an animal had mirrored or influenced my fate. Mine was not simply a life with other animals, but a life because of animals. It had been this way since my beginning, born on a forest lookout station in the High Sierras, surrounded by millions of acres of wilderness and many more animals than humans. Since infancy, the first faces I imprinted, the first faces I ever really loved, were animal.

In Hawaii...there's a spot they call the Toilet Bowl. There're these huge whirlpools because it's where the incoming and outgoing tides meet and crash into each other. It goes around and around like when you flush a toilet. If you wipe out there, you get pulled underwater and it's hard to float up again. Depending on the waves you might never make it back to the surface. So there you are, underwater, pounded by waves, and there's nothing you can do. Flailing around's not gonna get you anywhere. You'll just use up your energy. You've never been so scared in your life. But unless you get over that fear you'll never be a real surfer. You have to face death, get to really know it, then overcome it. When you're down in that whirlpool you start thinking about all kinds of things. It's like you get to be friends with death, have a heart-to-heart talk with it.

Do you ever feel like you are giving far fewer fucks and yet still caring so much it sometimes feels like there is only the most tissue-thin layer separating your soul from this world? Like your heart may be broken but your spirit is still rising? Are you refusing to conform and somehow still fitting just right? Able to look people right in the eye without apology and also like you’re a teenager again, bashful and blushing and off-kilter, like that moment when lips unexpectedly pressed against your head and face buried in your hair fingers trailed down y our arm, the way your stomach can flip-flop like that, even now. Do you ever walk on purpose even when you have nowhere to go? Do you notice things deeply, like dark red lipstick prints on pristine white coffee mugs? Like the way whiskey burns and cool white sheets feel against your skin at the end of the day? Are you claiming your identity, clear and strong and true, and also sinking into the vast unknowable mystery of your all? Do your days feel like longing and acquiescence and learning to stop grasping at things that are ready to leave or that choose not to come closer? Are you making a home of your own skin and inviting the world inside? Are you learning that cultivating solid boundaries and driving into a wide open horizon both feel like freedom, like the harsh desert mountains and the soft ocean wisdom and the road to healing that joins the two? Does it all feels like solidity, like truth, like forgiveness and recklessness and heat and sexy and holy, all rolled up together? Do you crave the burn of heat from another and the for nothing to be louder than sound of your own heartbeat, all at once? Do you finally know that you can choose a love and a life that does not break you? That you can claim a softer beauty and a kinder want. That even your animal hunger can soften its rough edges and say a full-throated yes to what is good and kind and holy. Do you remember that insanity is not a prerequisite for passion and that there is another pathway to your art, one that does not demand your pain as payment for its own becoming? Are you learning to show up? To take up space? To feel the power? Is it full of contradiction, does it feel like fire underwater, are you rising to sing?

The middle boy always reminded Thomas Hudson of an otter. He had the same color hair as an otter’s fur and it had almost the same texture as that of an underwater animal and he browned all over in a strange dark gold tan. He always reminded his father of the sort of animal that has a sound and humorous life by itself. Otters and bears are the animals that joke most and bears, of course, are very close to men. This boy would never be wide enough and strong enough to be a bear and he would never be an athlete, nor did he want to be; but he had a lovely small-animal quality and he had a good mind and a life of his own. He was affectionate and he had a sense of justice and was good company. He was also a Cartesian doubter and an avid arguer and he teased well and without meanness although sometimes he teased toughly. He had other qualities no one knew about and the other two boys respected him immensely although they tried to tease him and tear him down on any point where he was vulnerable. Naturally they had rows among themselves and they teased each other with considerable malice, but they were well mannered and respectful with grown-ups.

It is impossible to live life effectively without God. He’s the oxygen for life! Yet a man will strap on an oxygen tank and dive into life, trying to make it without God—but he keeps having to come up for air because the tank is limited, finite. And one by one the hoses on those tanks start to burst, and he ends up spending his life underwater, sucking air through a pinched hose and wondering why life isn’t as good as he thought it would be. It’s God that’s missing. This man doesn’t have the real thing! He’s living on substitutes, and substitutes never satisfy. But instead of realizing, “Oh, I’ve got a rubber hose in my mouth and a tank on my back. I wasn’t meant to live like this,” we tend to think, “I don’t have the right tank . . . I’ll try something else” or “I don’t have enough tanks; there’s somebody else who’s got dozens of them. I just need more.” And that’s the lie. We need to come up, shed the tank, drop the rubber hoses, and breathe the fresh, wide-open air of God and God’s grace. Only he can satisfy. Remember, sinning is what you do when you’re not satisfied in God, and sinning is what you do when you’re chasing after something other than God, namely, one of your idols.

Don’t worry about me, really,” Gideon said, for probably the millionth useless time. “I don’t think she’ll actually kill me. Or if she does, it’ll be an accident. She’s just very careless.” “She nearly drowned you twice!” “I might be misremembering that.” “I don’t think there’s a way to misremember!” “I’m her defense, she didn’t know I couldn’t breathe underwater. The first time, anyway.” “That,” Nico said, aghast, “is not a defense!” Gideon though, was laughing. “You know, Max is perfectly unbothered by all of this,” he said. “You should consider doing what he does.” “What, dragging my ass across the carpet?” “No, and he’s stopped doing that,” Gideon said. “Thankfully.” “Gideon, I just want you to be okay,” Nico told him pleadingly. “Por favor. Je t’en supplie.” “I am, Nico. Worrying about me is just your excuse to avoid your own life—which, by the way, I know nothing about,” Gideon pointedly reminded him. “Are you planning to tell me anything, or am I just always going to be your princess in the tower?” “You’d make a terrible princess, first of all,” Nico muttered. “You haven’t the figure for a corset at all, and as for the rest, believe me, I would if I could—” “But you can’t,” Gideon preemptively supplied, and grimaced.

Creed by Abigail Carroll, p.196-197 I believe in the life of the word, the diplomacy of food. I believe in salt-thick ancient seas and the absoluteness of blue. A poem is an ark, a suitcase in which to pack the universe—I believe in the universality of art, of human thirst for a place. I believe in Adam's work of naming breath and weather—all manner of wind and stillness, humidity and heat. I believe in the audacity of light, the patience of cedars, the innocence of weeds. I believe in apologies, soliloquies, speaking in tongues; the underwater operas of whales, the secret prayer rituals of bees. As for miracles— the perfection of cells, the integrity of wings—I believe. Bones know the dust from which they come; all music spins through space on just a breath. I believe in that grand economy of love that counts the tiny death of every fern and white-tailed fox. I believe in the healing ministry of phlox, the holy brokenness of saints, the fortuity of faults—of making and then redeeming mistakes. Who dares brush off the auguries of a storm, disdain the lilting eulogies of the moon? To dance is nothing less than an act of faith in what the prophets sang. I believe in the genius of children and the goodness of sleep, the eternal impulse to create. For love of God and the human race, I believe in the elegance of insects, the imminence of winter, the free enterprise of grace.

Yep! I was twenty-six years old and an associate beauty editor at Lucky, one of the top fashion magazines in America, and that’s all that most people knew about me. But beneath the surface, I was full of secrets: I was an addict, for one. A pillhead! I was also an alcoholic-in-training who drank warm Veuve Clicquot after work, alone in my boss’s office with the door closed; a conniving uptown doctor shopper who haunted twenty-four-hour pharmacies while my coworkers were at home watching True Blood in bed with their boyfriends; a salami-and-provolone-puking bulimic who spent a hundred dollars a day on binge foods when things got bad (and they got bad often); a weepy, wobbly hallucination-prone insomniac who jumped six feet in the air à la LeBron James and gobbled Valium every time a floorboard squeaked in her apartment; a tweaky self-mutilator who sat in front of The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, digging gory abscesses into her bikini line with Tweezerman Satin Edge Needle Nose Tweezers; a slutty and self-loathing downtown party girl fellatrix rushing to ruin; and—perhaps most of all—a lonely weirdo who felt like she was underwater all of the time. My brains were so scrambled you could’ve ordered them for brunch at Sarabeth’s; I let art-world guys choke me out during unprotected sex; I only had one friend, a Dash Snow–wannabe named Marco who tried to stick syringes in my neck and once slurped from my nostrils when I got a cocaine nosebleed;

It is often said that the separation of the present reality from transcendence, so commonplace today, is pernicious in that it undermines the universe of fixed values. Because life on Earth is the only thing that exists, because it is only in this life that we can seek fulfillment, the only kind of happiness that can be offered to us is purely carnal. Heavens have not revealed anything to us; there are no signs that would indicate the need to devote ourselves to some higher, nonmaterial goals. We furnish our lives ever more comfortably; we build ever more beautiful buildings; we invent ever more ephemeral trends, dances, one-season stars; we enjoy ourselves. Entertainment derived from a nineteenth-century funfair is today becoming an industry underpinned by an ever more perfect technology. We are celebrating a cult of machines—which are replacing us at work, in the kitchen, in the field—as if we were pursuing the idealized ambience of the royal court (with its bustling yet idle courtiers) and wished to extend it across the whole world. In fifty years, or at most a hundred, four to five billion people will become such courtiers. At the same time, a feeling of emptiness, superficiality, and sham sets in, one that is particularly dominant in civilizations that have left the majority of primitive troubles, such as hunger and poverty, behind them. Surrounded by underwater-lit swimming pools and chrome and plastic surfaces, we are suddenly struck by the thought that the last remaining beggar, having accepted his fate willingly, thus turning it into an ascetic act, was incomparably richer than man is today, with his mind fed TV nonsense and his stomach feasting on delicatessen from exotic lands. The beggar believed in eternal happiness, the arrival of which he awaited during his short-term dwelling in this vale of tears, looking as he did into the vast transcendence ahead of him. Free time is now becoming a space that needs to be filled in, but it is actually a vacuum, because dreams can be divided into those that can be realized immediately—which is when they stop being dreams—and those that cannot be realized by any means. Our own body, with its youth, is the last remaining god on the ever-emptying altars; no one else needs to be obeyed and served. Unless something changes, our numerous Western intellectuals say, man is going to drown in the hedonism of consumption. If only it was accompanied by some deep pleasure! Yet there is none: submerged into this slavish comfort, man is more and more bored and empty. Through inertia, the obsession with the accumulation of money and shiny objects is still with us, yet even those wonders of civilization turn out to be of no use. Nothing shows him what to do, what to aim for, what to dream about, what hope to have. What is man left with then? The fear of old age and illness and the pills that restore mental balance—which he is losing, inbeing irrevocably separated from transcendence.

As humans formed by the hands of a creative, imaginative God, we crave the supernatural. Believe it or not, we yearn for the very power we are actually destined for. It is why media concerning magic, witchcraft and sorcery is so prevalent today, because we were born for greater planes than most of us have currently seen. Amazingly, we are actually created to work in the same supernatural powers displayed in the bible and we are feeling the lack of it as our culture turns to crafty, counterfeit imitations. Though there are a few who perform miraculous acts around the world, the rest of us are left leading considerably mundane lives in a compromised condition, as if in half-form. Nevertheless, we are sons and daughters made in the image of an all-powerful God Who longs to see us live as supernatural kingdom-beings who have claimed their birthright and are moving in signs and wonders to lead a generation to Him. Assuredly, it is possible to manifest God’s glory through His great power in order to heal the wounded, sick and dying and bring hope and life to people who are dry and desolate. One day, it may even be possible to breathe underwater without scuba gear or fly without aviation. As for seeking, that is a gift accessible to anyone. Seek God, soak up His presence and you will find all that you long for, completing the destiny He planned for you before you were formed in your mother’s womb. My question is this: Do you long to move in the supernatural? If yes, the answer is simple. Seek. Seek Him. He is waiting.

That girl is me. Me and Peter, in the hot tub on the ski trip. Oh my God. I scream. Margot comes racing in, wearing one of those Korean beauty masks on her face with slits for eyes, nose, and mouth. “What? What?” I try to cover the computer screen with my hand, but she pushes it out of the way, and then she lets out a scream too. Her mask falls off. “Oh my God! Is that you?” Oh my God oh my God oh my God. “Don’t let Kitty see!” I shout. Kitty’s wide-eyed. “Lara Jean, I thought you were a goody-goody.” “I am!” I scream. Margot gulps. “That…that looks like…” “I know. Don’t say it.” “Don’t worry, Lara Jean,” Kitty soothes. “I’ve seen worse on regular TV, not even HBO.” “Kitty, go to your room!” Margot yells. Kitty whimpers and clings closer to me. I can’t believe what I am seeing. The caption reads Goody two shoes Lara Jean having full-on sex with Kavinsky in the hot tub. Do condoms work underwater? Guess we’ll find out soon enough. ;) The comments are a lot of wide-eyed emojis and lols. Someone named Veronica Chen wrote, What a slut! Is she Asian?? I don’t even know who Veronica Chen is! “Who could have done this to me?” I wail, pressing my hands to my cheeks. “I can’t feel my face. Is my face still my face?” “Who the hell is Anonybitch?” Margot demands. “No one knows,” I say, and the roaring in my ears is so loud I can hardly hear my own voice. “People just re-gram her. Or him. Am I talking really loud right now?” I’m in shock. Now I can’t feel my hands or feet. I’m gonna faint. Is this happening? Is this my life?

The first buddy pair enters the deep end of the pool and begins buddy breathing. The games begin when, like a hungry shark, an instructor menacingly stalks the two trainees. Suddenly, the instructor darts forward, grabs the snorkel, and tosses it about ten feet away where it slowly sinks to the bottom. It is the duty of the last person to have taken a breath, to retrieve the snorkel. As the swimmer dives ten feet deep to recover the snorkel, his buddy floats motionless, his face underwater, holding his breath, patiently conserving oxygen. The swimmer returns with the snorkel and hands it to his buddy, but before his teammate can grab it and breathe, the instructor sadistically snatches the snorkel and again tosses it away. The swimmer, still holding his breath, dives to get the snorkel, but the instructor grabs his facemask and floods it with pool water. The swimmer has a choice. He can clear his mask of water, by blowing valuable air into it through his nose, or he can continue to swim with his mask full of water blurring his vision. The swimmer makes the right decision and retrieves the snorkel. All this time both trainees are holding their breath, battling the urge to surface and suck in a lung full of sweet fresh air. With lungs burning and vision dimming, the swimmer hands the snorkel to his buddy. After taking only two breaths, his buddy returns the snorkel and, finally the instructor allows the swimmer to breathe his two breaths. While the trainees try to breathe, instructors splash water into foam around them while screaming insults. Despite the distractions, the snorkel travels back and forth between the trainees until once again, an instructor snatches it, tosses it across the pool, and floods both students’ masks. This harassment continues until the instructor is satisfied with the trainees’ performance.

The ocean made space for me, pressing against the blackness of my assumed skin, buoying me and counter-acting the heaviness of the lead fastened around my waist. I kicked and continued my initial dive, feeling the pressures sliding back against my belly and legs, the quiet acceptance of the seas. Space and oceans have much in common, both are alien to us, not our element, both contain mysteries, dangers, sudden beauties of their own and beyond our land-bound experience. But space is a container of nothingness, a vacuum, a void of immeasurable loneliness and occasional transcendence. Water is a repository of life, and the life asserts itself as you move through the ocean; creatures large and small, beautiful or stunningle grotesque according to their custom, aquatic forests and microscopic landscapes, beings caught between the layers of life, rocks made of living creatures and living creatures made of stone, vegetable animals and animated plants and sudden deep, heart-breaking, lovely jewels that flick their trailing rainbows and dart away from you between the fronds of weeds, leaving shimmering mysteries that can be pursued, but never truly caught and comprehended. Space does not care whether you are there or not, and the struggle to survive between worlds is a fight to avoid being sucked into a vacuum, into an ultimate nil. Implacable in its indifference, it kills you simply because it is, and crushes you with the weight of your knowledge of its indifference. But the ocean is not indifferent. It reacts and shapes itself to your presence or absence, presents its laws as implacable realities, but an instant later displays the very non-exemplar of that rule swimming calmly through the depths. Accept the strangeness and the ocean opens to you, gives you freedom and beauty, a hook into otherness. But wonder approached in fear is cancelled, disappears into threathening shiverings of distant plants, into terrifying movements of bulky darkness through the rocks.

Sam Underwater, everything is quiet. Tranquil. Like heaven is all around you, caressing your body, pulling you into its embrace. Deeper and deeper, it pulls at your legs until they beg to be released. I hold my water-resistant camera in front of me and take multiple pictures of the cold depths of the ocean. Its beauty never fails to mesmerize me. But I can’t stay for too long; sooner or later, that urge to breathe always pulls me back to the surface toward the dark sky littered with a million flickering lights … back into the noise of swooshing water and rushing wind. The shore is mostly deserted, except for a few beer cans, party cups, and some clothes and trash lying scattered all around. The only other person there is Nate Wilson … the most handsome guy at school and so much more than that. He’s sitting on a few rocks near the edge of the beach with a girl by his side. I can’t stop watching. Their hands touch briefly, but then the wave overtakes me and blocks my view. When the water lowers, I shake my head, but the waves keep picking up. Still, I hold up my camera and take a few pictures. Right as he turns his head toward me, I dive underwater again. Here, there are no boys, no girls, and no secret touches. Just me and the water, and all the beautiful creatures below that need to meet my camera. A single picture says more than words ever will. No matter how powerful they are. Nate People say it only takes a few minutes for your life to be destroyed. I never believed them … until today. With just the snap of a finger, a stupid decision and a simple push, I marked my own fate. My body grows colder and colder the longer I stay in the water. It consumes me whole as I stray farther and farther away from myself. From reality. I’m so damn dizzy, but I can’t collapse here. Not now, not in the middle of the ocean. I take a deep breath and peel my eyes open, forcing myself to go. That’s when I spot her … the girl and her camera. FLASH. I cover my eyes with my hand. Salty seawater enters my nostrils and mouth as I struggle to swim. When I open my eyes again, the girl is gone; swallowed by the same waves that drag me back to the shore. As my feet sink into the sand and the water creeps up against my toes, I stop and turn around, clutching the long red hairs in my hand as though they’re my last lifeline. This is now the place where not only my life changed forever. But hers too.

I awake with a start, shaking the cobwebs of sleep from my mind. It’s pitch-dark out, the wind howling. It takes a couple seconds to get my bearings, to realize I’m in my parents’ bed, Ryder beside me, on his side, facing me. Our hands are still joined, though our fingers are slack now. “Hey, you,” he says sleepily. “That one was loud, huh?” “What was?” “Thunder. Rattled the windows pretty bad.” “What time is it?” “Middle of the night, I’d say.” I could check my phone, but that would require sitting up and letting go of his hand. Right now, I don’t want to do that. I’m too comfortable. “Have you gotten any sleep at all?” I ask him, my mouth dry and cottony. “I think I drifted off for a little bit. Till…you know…the thunder started up again.” “Oh. Sorry.” “It should calm down some when the eye moves through.” “If there’s still an eye by the time it gets here. The center of circulation usually starts breaking up once it goes inland.” Yeah, all those hours watching the Weather Channel occasionally come in handy. He gives my hand a gentle squeeze. “Wow, maybe you should consider studying meteorology. You know, if the whole film-school thing doesn’t work out for you.” “I could double major,” I shoot back. “I bet you could.” “What are you going to study?” I ask, curious now. “I mean, besides football. You’ve got to major in something, don’t you?” He doesn’t answer right away. I wonder what’s going through his head--why he’s hesitating. “Astrophysics,” he says at last. “Yeah, right.” I roll my eyes. “Fine, if you don’t want to tell me…” “I’m serious. Astrophysics for undergrad. And then maybe…astronomy.” “What, you mean in graduate school?” He just nods. “You’re serious? You’re going to major in something that tough? I mean, most football players major in something like phys ed or underwater basket weaving, don’t they?” “Greg McElroy majored in business marketing,” he says with a shrug, ignoring my jab. “Yeah, but…astrophysics? What’s the point, if you’re just going to play pro football after you graduate anyway?” “Who says I want to play pro football?” he asks, releasing my hand. “Are you kidding me?” I sit up, staring at him in disbelief. He’s the best quarterback in the state of Mississippi. I mean, football is what he does…It’s his life. Why wouldn’t he play pro ball? He rolls over onto his back, staring at the ceiling, his arms folded behind his head. “Right, I’m just some dumb jock.” “Oh, please. Everyone knows you’re the smartest kid in our class. You always have been. I’d give anything for it to come as easily to me as it does to you.” He sits up abruptly, facing me. “You think it’s easy for me? I work my ass off. You have no idea what I’m working toward. Or what I’m up against,” he adds, shaking his head. “Probably not,” I concede. “Anyway, if anyone can major in astrophysics and play SEC ball at the same time, you can. But you might want to lose the attitude.” He drops his head into his hands. “I’m sorry, Jem. It’s just…everyone has all these expectations. My parents, the football coach--” “You think I don’t get that? Trust me. I get it better than just about anyone.” He lets out a sigh. “I guess our families have pretty much planned out our lives for us, haven’t they?” “They think they have, that’s for sure,” I say.

One of the keys to exponential thinking is filling your thoughts with what-if statements. Evie Mackie of the Innovation Hub at the John Lewis Partnership says that “‘What If’ statements come into play to bring unruly scenarios into the picture. For example, ‘What if the human race needed to adapt and live in a world which was 90 percent underwater’ or ‘What if we could no longer touch things with our hands to interact.’ This helps conceptualize a WHOLE different array of things we may never have thought of otherwise and allows us to imagine what we would need to survive in a future world, which could be a very different place.

We want to make the battle of Jeb’s Peak even more epic than it was in real life,” said Alex, “so we’re giving Herobrine loads more kids in our comic book. They’ve all got awesome powers and cool names.” “Yes, but why does Herobrine need to have a long-lost sister as well?” said Carl. “Long lost siblings are awesome,” said Alex. “Haven’t you read the issue where Seth the Elf discovers he’s got five twin brothers?” “Of course, I have,” said Carl. “Anyway, Dave, here’s the list of Herobrine’s kids we’ve come up with so far. Tell us what you think.” “Er…” said Dave. “Thunderothbrine,” said Carl. “He’s Herobrine’s youngest son, who escaped from Herobrine’s lava castle by turning himself into a bolt of lightning. He dedicated his life to the ninja arts, and now he can throw shurikens made of electricity.” “Why would Herobrine have a lava castle?” Dave asked. “Because it’s cool,” said Alex. “Okay, here’s another one,” said Carl. “Alex came up with this one. Reverserothbrine. She looks just like Herobrine, but everything about her is reversed. Her head faces the other way, and she wears shoes on her hands and eats her dinner with her feet.” “Um…” said Dave. “I told you that one was rubbish,” Carl said to Alex. “Now what about this one, Dave: Fishrothbrine. He can summon krakens and can breathe underwater for up to three hours. Or this one: Deathrothbrine. He dies every issue, but then comes back alive in the next issue.” “Tell him my other one,” said Alex. “All right,” said Carl, rolling his eyes. “Alex came up with Cakerothbrine. She can summon cakes and is Herobrine’s long lost wife, who left him after he never helped to clean the house. She has triplet daughters who are all ninjas: Firerothbrine, who has the power of fire, Waterothbrine, who has the power of water, and Porkchoprothbrine, who has the power of porkchops.

It felt like the drunken part of falling in love, the erratic and uncompromising compulsion that made you do dumb shit and your best shit at the same time. She had to stop herself from running. She had to stop herself from crying or screaming or both. It felt as if she were underwater and at the end of her oxygen, with the surface, where she could finally take a deep breath and live, just above. She wanted to live. She wanted to live full-on, to the hilt, with every cell.

MacIver notes that octopuses, while underwater creatures, seem to maximize the extent of their sensory capacities. They have very large eyes, and tend to remain still while executing complex tasks. It’s dangerous being an octopus; from the point of view of a predatory sea-dweller, you are a vulnerable bag of delicious nutrients. To survive, they have had to develop innovative defensive strategies, camouflaging themselves by changing skin color and emitting clouds of ink when forced to flee. Intelligence is a part of that defensive arsenal; an octopus will hide among rocks and coral when it sleeps, often arranging pieces so as to better shield itself from view. Perhaps the evolutionary pressure that led to large octopus brains was of a completely different type from that which led to land-dwelling animals.

All one’s actual apprehension of what it is like to be a woman, the irreconcilable difference of it—that sense of living one’s deepest life underwater, that dark involvement with blood and birth and death—could now be declared invalid, unnecessary, one never felt it at all.

REMINDER: Tools for Handling Emotions 1. Acknowledge Feelings with Words “You were looking forward to that playdate. How disappointing!” “It can be so frustrating when train tracks fall apart.” 2. Acknowledge Feelings with Writing “Oh no! We don’t have the ingredients we need! Let’s make a shopping list.” “You really want that underwater Lego set. Let’s write that down on your wish list.” 3. Acknowledge Feelings with Art “You seem so sad.” (Draw a stick figure with big tears, or simply hand over a crayon or pencil.) “You are this angry!” (Make angry lines or rip and crumple paper.) 4. Give in Fantasy What You Cannot Give in Reality “I wish we had a million billion more hours to play.” 5. Acknowledge Feelings with (Almost) Silent Attention “Ugh!” “Mmm.” “Ooh.” “Huh.” • All feelings can be accepted. Some actions must be limited! • Sit on those “buts.” Substitute: “The problem is . . .” or “Even though you know . . .” • Match the emotion. Be dramatic! • Resist the urge to ask questions of a distressed child.

One day I’ll probably look back at this summer as the highlight of my life. Fossil discovery, monster dinosaur, underwater cave spelunking and all. If I live through it, that is.

They say the odds of us being conceived come out to one in four hundred trillion; the fact that we’re alive, healthy and able to work from nine to five is literally a miracle. I once heard a Buddhist metaphor that described the amazing probability of this ‘miracle’: Imagine a lifebuoy thrown into an ocean, and a single turtle living somewhere in all the oceans, swimming around underwater. The chances of my being conceived were the same as the odds of Mr Turtle sticking his head out of the water straight into the middle of that life donut – or the same as the chances of my dad having an orgasm sober.

Being underwater reminds me of the beauty in life’s simplicity. The sea pulses with life. It exudes it, breathes it; a constant reminder that everything is liquid

Being underwater reminds me of the beauty in life’s simplicity. The sea pulses with life. It exudes it, breathes it; a constant reminder that everything is liquid.

By felling poplars and willows to build dams, beavers single-handedly transform temperate forests into wetlands, which then attract and support a remarkable array of neighbors: pileated woodpeckers drilling nesting cavities into dead trees; wood ducks and Canada geese settling in abandoned beaver lodges; herons and kingfishers and swallows enjoying the benefits of the “artificial” pond, along with frogs, lizards, and other slow-water species like dragonflies, mussels, and aquatic beetles. As do those underwater colonies of coral, the beaver creates a platform that sustains an amazingly diverse assemblage of life.

Things go wrong when you fish, and those chances increase when you’re in a boat. Often this has to do with what’s known as human error. This is the preferred term because it doesn’t name the human who made the error, especially when that human is me. Once, Dave and I were in his canoe on the last quarter mile of a long day on the water. We were around a bend from the takeout. Beyond one final rapids we would pull over and load up his van. The only thing standing in our way was a large rock. The current picked up and moved us faster, but it would be easy to avoid the rock. It would almost be harder to hit it than to miss it. I was in the bow, Dave was in the stern. Without question he was the captain, I’m not sure a fifteen-foot canoe has a captain, but Dave would be the captain of anything from a kayak to a steamer. “Go to the left of the rock,” he bellowed. This could not have been clearer and took on some urgency as the rock got nearer. Yet we rowed at cross-purposes and continued to head straight toward it. In search of clarity I shouted: “Our left or the rock’s left?” The metaphysical nature of this question has remained with me over the years. If it appeared in a Basho haiku, it might be considered cryptically wise or at least a noble mistranslation. Canoe in summer Floats slowly down the river Past the large rock’s left Not this time. The last thing I remember hearing, which echoed in my ears underwater as we turned over, was Dave saying emphatically, “The rock doesn’t have a left!” My tendency to overanalyze simple situations was captured in this question, though I’m embarrassed to admit in private moments it still makes sense to me that a rock can have a left. Hitting a rock with a canoe may have many reasons but one result. The canoe tipped at once, decisively, and Dave’s only concern was the fate of his tackle box, which occupied a place in his spiritual landscape like the Gutenberg Bible. Thankfully, the river wasn’t deep there, just a few feet. Once the tackle box was salvaged—which he always kept tightly shut in case of this exact sort of catastrophe—Dave was in a fairly agreeable mood. He didn’t care about getting wet or even mention it. He had the grin of a teenager who’s just talked his way out of a speeding ticket. This was not the first canoe he’d tipped out of. He was seventy-five years old.

And so it is that the three Norwegians have conspired to alter the course that Levick’s life takes that day: Borchgrevink had discovered that in this area the barrier (perhaps by virtue of being bent and broken by an underwater island over which it passed) was accessible, then Nansen had given his ship Fram to this other Norwegian, this “fine looking man” as Campbell described him, who had sailed it here and set up camp on the only avenue available to the British to carry out their intended exploration.

The tree you used to climb when you were a kid will die. The beach where you kissed your partner will be underwater. Mosquitoes and other insects will be year-round companions. New diseases will emerge. Cults of cool will celebrate the spiritual purity of ice. You’ll grill slabs of lab-grown “meat” and drink Zinfandel from Alaska. Your digital watch will monitor your internal body temperature. Border walls will be fortified. Entrepreneurs will make millions selling you micro cooling devices. Fourth of July celebrations will become life-threatening events. Snow will feel exotic.

The sight of it stunned Joe to the point that, if the strength of the sea had not held him, he would have fallen down. In this underwater existence, he was straight. This was his life’s curiosity incarnate. He had often wondered how his life would have been different—easier—if he were a heterosexual man.

How?” she whispered, realizing that air was still exiting her mouth. Every time she spoke, a few bubbles popped out as well. That meant there was air in her lungs. But... The prick at the side of her neck. She watched Imber’s eyes widen with brief horror before his clawed fingers touched the side of her neck. “I don’t... I don’t know how I did that.” She reached up her hand to touch his and realized there was a small tendril stuck to the side of her neck. Shifting her head from side to side, she realized she could almost feel it in her throat. Just a little hint that there was a foreign body somehow inside her. She watched his chest rise and fall with a surprised breath, and she felt her own mimic his. “Are you... breathing for me?” she asked, her voice little more than a whisper. “I don’t know.” It was the only explanation, and yet she didn’t know how that was possible. He couldn’t breathe for her underwater. It wasn’t scientifically possible and yet, here it was. She was underwater. With him. Not drowning even though her mouth piece had long been on the ground at her feet and... and... “Wow,” she whispered. “I didn’t know we could do this.” “Neither did I.” The shock had already faded from his eyes, though. He reached for her, his claws tangling in her long skirts as he dragged her closer to him. “But now you can be here without fear for your life. You can live under the water with me.

She followed them underwater until she could no longer breathe and swam back for air. Until she could no longer see anything in those depths. Until she no longer had strength to keep diving down. And she tried. Swimming, screaming, fighting. She tried her very best. To drown herself along with them. To feel what they felt. As she had been trying to all her life.

Schwieger ordered the submarine to the bottom so his crew could dine in peace. “And now,” said Zentner, “there was fresh fish, fried in butter, grilled in butter, sautéed in butter, all that we could eat.” These fish and their residual odors, however, could only have worsened the single most unpleasant aspect of U-boat life: the air within the boat. First there was the basal reek of three dozen men who never bathed, wore leather clothes that did not breathe, and shared one small lavatory. The toilet from time to time imparted to the boat the scent of a cholera hospital and could be flushed only when the U-boat was on the surface or at shallow depths, lest the undersea pressure blow material back into the vessel. This tended to happen to novice officers and crew, and was called a “U-boat baptism.” The odor of diesel fuel infiltrated all corners of the boat, ensuring that every cup of cocoa and piece of bread tasted of oil. Then came the fragrances that emanated from the kitchen long after meals were cooked, most notably that close cousin to male body odor, day-old fried onions. All this was made worse by a phenomenon unique to submarines that occurred while they were submerged. U-boats carried only limited amounts of oxygen, in cylinders, which injected air into the boat in a ratio that varied depending on the number of men aboard. Expended air was circulated over a potassium compound to cleanse it of carbonic acid, then reinjected into the boat’s atmosphere. Off-duty crew were encouraged to sleep because sleeping men consumed less oxygen. When deep underwater, the boat developed an interior atmosphere akin to that of a tropical swamp. The air became humid and dense to an unpleasant degree, this caused by the fact that heat generated by the men and by the still-hot diesel engines and the boat’s electrical apparatus warmed the hull. As the boat descended through ever colder waters, the contrast between the warm interior and cold exterior caused condensation, which soaked clothing and bred colonies of mold. Submarine crews called it “U-boat sweat.” It drew oil from the atmosphere and deposited it in coffee and soup, leaving a miniature oil slick. The longer the boat stayed submerged, the worse conditions became. Temperatures within could rise to over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. “You can have no conception of the atmosphere that is evolved by degrees under these circumstances,” wrote one commander, Paul Koenig, “nor of the hellish temperature which brews within the shell of steel.

The more you are readily available for someone all the time, the cheaper your value becomes in their mind. Value has nothing to do with need, it has everything to do with availability. What do you think is the thing that we need the most in life to survive? It is oxygen. Oxygen is even more important than water because without it we can’t even survive for more than a few minutes and yet no one values it because it is so readily available. But put their head underwater and they will realize the value of oxygen in less than a minute and be desperate for it. They will be gasping for breath and the only thing they will want at that time is some oxygen to breathe. From something they didn’t value at all, in a minute it becomes the only thing they ever need. Oxygen was always important for them but they didn’t value it because they didn’t notice its absence. People who use you are no different. If you always make yourself available to ungrateful people, they will continue to use you and never value you even if you are someone absolutely crucial to their very survival.

The Newton Twins were the first to try to force the machine to be wrong. Both their tickets said Old Age, so they committed suicide. Ten times they tried, and ten times they failed. Gun jammed. Car engine died. Gas ran out. Tree branch snapped—and by now, the media was all over it. They injected HIV, and it just went away. Concrete slippers in the lake, underwater for half an hour—but the medics brought them back to life, pictures of health. One of the twins, Julie, jumped off the railway bridge, but her sister was scared of heights, so abstained. Nonetheless, she was caught by the tarp on a slow-moving train, and trudged home three days later. I try to inject some perspective, but it’s hard when religion died overnight.

Known as “Leni,” Helene Bertha Amalie Riefenstahl was born on August 22, 1902. During the Third Reich she was known throughout Germany as a close friend and confidant of the Adolf Hitler. Recognized as a strong swimmer and talented artist, she studied dancing as a child and performed across Europe until an injury ended her dancing career. During the 1920’s Riefenstahl was inspired to become an actress and starred in five motion pictures produced in Germany. By 1932 she directed her own film “Das Blaue Licht.” With the advent of the Hitler era she directed “Triumph des Willens” anf “Olympia” which became recognized as the most innovative and effective propaganda films ever made. Many people who knew of her relationship with Hitler insisted that they had an affair, although she persistently denied this. However, her relationship with Adolf Hitler tarnished her reputation and haunted her after the war. She was arrested and charged with being a Nazi sympathizer, but it was never proven that she was involved with any war crimes. Convinced that she had been infatuated and involved with the Führer, her reputation and career became totally destroyed. Her former friends shunned her and her brother, who was her last remaining relative, was killed in action on the “Eastern Front.” Seeing a bleak future “Leni” Riefenstahl left Germany, to live amongst the Nuba people in Africa. During this time Riefenstahl met and began a close friendship with Horst Kettner, who assisted her with her acknowledged brilliant photography. They became an item from the time she was 60 years old and he was 20. Together they wrote and produced photo books about the Nuba tribes and later filmed marine life. At that time she was one of the world's oldest scuba divers and underwater photographer. Leni Riefenstahl died of cancer on September 8, 2003 at her home in Pöcking, Germany and was laid to rest at the Munich Waldfriedhof.

welcomed the opportunity to become the first astronaut trained underwater in a swimming pool to simulate the effects of neutral buoyancy, trying to maneuver in a weightless environment in space. Some of my colleagues thought I was being eccentric, but the sensations in the pool prepared me for what it might feel like drifting along at 17,500 miles an hour, tethered to a spacecraft.

The Baron folded the letter and set it upon the side table. “All I know, boy, is that life is, on occasion, entirely too vast for my tastes.” Here he submerged himself, and afterward did a great many bubbles rise up from the depths of the bathtub, this due to the fact of the Baron screaming underwater.