After almost two weeks away from the Gulf Coast, I’m headed back this weekend. My brother and I talked today (he lives there) and he spoke with a guy who lives two miles from Ft Morgan on the Gulf. He told of watching the Gulf die a little more every day. In front of his home he said there is hardly anything alive.

Oxygen levels measured at Ft. Morgan, Alabama, are the lowest they have ever been. A huge fish kill is expected. And so it begins….

It has been difficult being away from the unfolding disaster yet I feel I am given small periods of grace where I can come back to my mountain home, take some deep breaths and then dive back into my work in my birthplace.

I dread going back yet it is there is where my heart lies and where my mind is almost constantly. To help myself cope I visualize the well capped and clean. I see the water being cleaned and healed. I hold a space for the wildlife and plants to heal…all this in my mind and heart. Who knows if it will help the situation. But it does help me. By holding a positive vision for the future I can grasp a thread of hope for recovery, if not in my lifetime, at some point. I want my grandchildren to see the Gulf as I have known it prior to this sad event.

It’s 4am and I just awoke for the second time tonight dreaming of sea turtles. In both dreams I had found a young loggerhead sea turtle with a small bit of oil on it. I cleaned it and put it in a bathtub until rescue workers arrived to further care for it.

As I looked out the window in the dream I saw a huge loggerhead sea turtle crawling up on the oil-soaked beach. This grandmother turtle was coated in oil. I ran outside to help her but by the time I got there rescue workers already had her on a stretcher taking her for cleaning and rehabilitation.

Every night I wake up with nightmares about the creatures of the Gulf Coast. Sleep hasn’t been great but tonight a therapist friend of mine was staying at my mom’s home–in the dream. He remained invisible yet I could hear him in the other room. It seems my psyche is working out my stress about this disaster by having the wildlife rescue theme tonight and implanting a live-in therapist in my dreams.

My mom and I chatted last night and she tearfully expressed her love and concern for the ocean. She said, And I don’t know it like you do. Scuba diving has given me the opportunity to claim the ocean as my first home, my true home. I have had intimate encounters with huge sea turtles, tiny arrow crabs, yellow-headed jaw fish and bicolor damselfish…to name just a few. So yes, I am taking the black cloud of oil and the colorless yet more-toxic dispersant filling the Gulf very personally. These are my friends and teachers that are dying.

BP announced yesterday it would give net profits from the oil being pumped from Deepwater Horizon to Gulf Coast wildlife. Since they say they’ve already spent a billion dollars on the cleanup I’m wondering if they really expect to have a net profit from the well. Seems like a blatantly stupid way to make themselves look good. Seriously, BP. And if they simply calculate just expense on this particular well it’s a fair bet that the 45 days it took them to design something that is half-way working to capture the oil was pretty darned expensive. Hmmmm….hmmmmm???

Today is World Ocean Day and my dive agency, PADI, is asking people to be aware that sharks are becoming more and more scarce. When the shark population crashes, everything under it will crash due to the balance sharks create in our waters. I tried explaining that to a man and his family who had caught a shark and left it to die on the beach. My environmental lesson didn’t help the shark. I walked back by later and found it rolling in the water. They had tossed it like garbage into the water.

Sometimes its difficult to stay hopeful, to stay positive with the environmental catastrophe happening in the Gulf. Yet I know nature is resilient and much more intelligent than humans. An example….Monsanto engineered seeds that were resistant to Roundup so fields could be sprayed with Roundup to kill weeds but not the crop. Now, weeds have evolved to the point where Roundup is no longer working. The solution? Go back to more toxic sprays, more genetically engineered seeds…at least for some farmers. Others are going organic. Those who realize nature will outsmart us are learning to work with nature, not against it.

Slowly, seemingly at a snail’s pace, we are learning that nature is more powerful than we are and the only way to preserve any quality of life for ourselves and wildlife on the planet is to work with earth’s energies…the plants, ocean, wind…sunlight. If we make a friend of nature we can all thrive. To pit ourselves against it is a death sentence.

At 2.30am I was dreaming about blobs of thick, oozing oil on the white sand with the sound of helicopters flying overhead. I awakened with the phrase, “BP needs a piece of equipment large enough to hold the oil it is bringing to the surface but it will take two weeks to arrive from the North Sea.” I awakened with this statement echoing in my mind and couldn’t get back to sleep.

Can anyone help me understand how Buffoon Petroleum can be so short sighted? It is one bit of stupidity after another and frankly I don’t understand how they operate, seeing that they are the 5th or 6th biggest oil company in the world. And we trust our waters to these nut-jobs?

Okay…enough of the sleep-deprived rant. Now….before federal waters in the Pensacola area were closed a couple of guys were out scuba diving and one came up through a plume (remember those things BP says do not exist?) of oil 60 feet under the surface. He was coated in oil. Did you hear that from the media? Also, before the federal waters were closed a charter boat was snapper fishing and oil came up on their line and the snapper, caught at about 100 feet of depth, were coated in oil. This was reported on CNN.

Friends of mine have neighbors in Pensacola that are captains for oil rig vessels. The guy worked for Transocean until he resigned in December because he thought they didn’t have their stuff together. Coupled with BP, who are known to have safety violations in the past that caused accidents and deaths and Haliburton (I am intentionally leaving out the part of Satan’s spawn owning Haliburton because it might be too harsh) who is owned by one less-than-trustworthy person, are we really surprised that we have the scale of disaster in the Gulf of Mexico? We as a nation must stand up and demand accountability starting with ourselves, our governments and these sleeze-ball corporations who rape and pillage our earth while we stand by with dazed stares.

I like to focus my comments on what I experience while on the beaches but my nightmares prompted this commentary. Rather than seascapes I bring dreamscapes–nightmares– to the blog today. And this comes from the grief I am feeling which I describe this way: If I take all the sadness and grief I’ve ever felt in this lifetime about friends and family dying and multiply that by 100, it begins to describe my feelings. I can only touch small bits at a time and breath through it.