OCEAN Archives - Page 23 of 38 -

Loving the Earth

By Simone Lipscomb | June 25, 2014

Loving the Earth: Creating a Conscious Relationship with Our Planet

A slight breezed carried my SUP board downriver as I stopped paddling to watch a pair of bald eagles drag their talons along the surface of the water. Nearby great egrets crowned cypress trees, their white plumage dazzling against the background of blue sky. A mullet splashed in the mud-tinted water of the Magnolia River and brought my attention back from sky to earth. As my gaze turned downward a brown pelican folded her wings, as if in prayer, and dropped from the sky close to my board. All around life expressed in a beautiful ballet of balance with this lone patron admiring the dance. Bliss seemed shared by all but perhaps it might be better named communion.

One never knows what will be the call that brings us to our heart’s work. While I loved nature since childhood, I never felt the commitment…the calling…to dedicate my life’s work to it until the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill. It felt as if everything in life stopped so I could focus entirely on the Gulf Coast and the amazing life in our coastal ecosystems. During the first days of oil washing ashore I remember thinking the end of the world had arrived. How could this happen?

It’s easier to believe everything is okay than to pay attention to what’s really happening. I shared my book containing oil spill images with a cousin the other day that lives in Pensacola and she was shocked to see the reality I documented. There are people who live in Gulf Shores who still believe it wasn’t bad…that there wasn’t oil mixed with dispersant and it wasn’t fizzing in tidal pools of tiny fish gasping to their last breath. I know because I saw it first hand and stood on the beach weeping for every life I saw pass.

The most difficult thing I have ever experienced was witnessing the spill and its effects on innocent life which included small children playing in oily waters…so polluted that the benzene burned my eyes and throat. Video and photographs in my library document everything I saw but they can never share the true experience of grief beyond anything I’ve known.

A friend and mentor reminded me, during the first year of the spill, that there was a reason I was being called to witness the horror even though I might not understand why. Over four years have passed and I am more convinced that the only way to heal our broken planet is to heal our relationship with It and to heal our relationship with each other. That means healing our own lives.

The only solution I have found is to practice love…love as compassion…love as respect…love in the purest form of opening to surrender, to service.

Love for the planet requires opening the self. When we risk the deep opening of human heart to planetary heart we know the elation of unspeakable joy, of the heart’s expanding in answer to beauty. We also know the experience of grief and heartbreak when places, wildlife and humans we love are destroyed or profoundly injured.

Celebrating the beauty of the Magnolia River and other places of natural beauty relieves the grief that comes from being aware of the trials our planet is experiencing. There is resilience in nature and my hope is we will practice better stewardship before a non-reversible tipping point is reached.

As I remain engaged with nature’s rhythms through simple, daily observation and intention, I am drawn more deeply into partnership with the Earth. If we collectively open our hearts to loving this sacred planet, we can create a bond with each other that will transform darkness and create positive, lasting change.

Elemental Magic

By Simone Lipscomb | June 6, 2014

Being underwater is like home to me but being in the desert in Washington Slagbaai National Park is where I feel elemental energies of the planet the strongest.

The dirt roads of the park are filled with rocks, ruts, cactus bits, lizards and dust. The three hour drive through the park takes much patience to navigate the terrain. But to me the heat, dust and bumps that can make it uncomfortable only add to the uniqueness of this special place.

The island is shaped like the number ‘7’ and when visiting the north end of the island you begin in desert, connect with the Ocean on the east side of the island, north side and finally the west side while navigating through cactus and other desert vegetation. I could go on about the geology and natural history of it, but the reason I return every year is the way it affects me, the way it makes me feel, the strong sense of primal Earth energies that are still potent here.

My inner wildness feels drawn out as the sun’s heat draws moisture from my body. As my sweat mixes with salt spray blowing from the Ocean and across knife-sharp iron rock, my spirit is released to dance in strong winds–strong winds, strong spirit. There is no room for weakness here. Strength calls forth strength.

Shade only exists beneath thorny trees and near rock outcroppings made of ancient, fossilized coral so life is harsh, intense. Few humans exist here and efforts to establish dwellings have mostly failed. There are some places that should be left wild and untouched for the spirits of nature to roam and play and be untouched by humanity.

I too want to maintain wildness within me, never to be domesticated or tamed. Anyone who tries to tame my wild spirit soon understands the futility of the effort. I cherish it and love it and nurture it by connecting with places that sing to it through the dance of elemental magic.

A Little More Kindness

By Simone Lipscomb | June 5, 2014

Journal entry from 8am this morning:

My hands are still damp, I’m still in my wetsuit, but I wanted to write while the emotions are still fresh.

I had just turned my solo morning meditation dive when in front of me glided a large spotted eagle ray. Her long, thin tail trailing behind–a thin, black line against the blue sea. Her face beautiful in its beak-like design, eyes watching me as I watched her.

She arched across my right side leaving the sand flats where she had fed and headed down the top of the reef. I stopped and witnessed her graceful beauty–the slow, steady beat of her wings underwater–and felt my heart open as it does when beauty such as this touches me softly with its unexplainable magic.

So close to this magnificent creature was I, our eyes connected and thus did our innermost being.

She swam on and I did, too, parting with joy and appreciation. As I slowly kicked back, away from the ray, I felt a renewed commitment to cultivate kindness and gentleness for all creatures and especially those who are innocent of the abuses humans perpetuate apon their homes.

Floating in a Kaleidoscope

By Simone Lipscomb | June 2, 2014

The second dive today I found myself alone with no other divers around me. That’s not a bad thing…I enjoy solo diving. It wasn’t intentional but the two folks that went in at the same time wandered on while I floated weightless in a kaleidoscope of color. I couldn’t move, so mesmerized was I by stripes and dots and shades of the rainbow.

The Salt Pier is an operational salt production pier where ships are loaded with sea salt that is produced on Bonaire in evaporation ponds. When workers are not present, divers are allowed to visit and enjoy the amazing sea life that claims the pilings as home. It was here–amid hundreds of French grunts, a yellow-striped fish–where I experienced weightlessness as geometries and wild colors danced within inches of my mask.

If divers are still and don’t flail through the water, fish can be surprisingly accepting of our presence. I know of nothing else in this world I’d rather be doing than floating relaxed and at ease with a large school of fish. Today they moved as one so once I settled in, I became part of their school and we swayed in the gentle surge together. Around we went, slowly…ever-so-slowly…winding our way through massive pilings filled with sponges, soft and hard corals and colors as brilliant as the fish. Christmas tree worms decorated sponges in brilliant colors. Blennys less than half the size of my little finger popped in and out of their tiny holes in the coral and sponges, their eyes smaller than a pin head. The variety of life expressed in the Ocean, in one small area, is simply mind-blowing to me.

Slow and steady breathing through my regulator, motionless except for small pushes the Ocean gave me and my fish friends, I was truly at home. At peace. At home within myself.

A turquoise, pink and yellow rainbow parrotfish would occasionally dash through our school creating a cooperative parting of the mass. A jack would dart in and out and we simply moved out of the way, creating space…floating…existing in harmony.

Right now green parrots are screeching outside the screen porch as I sit and reflect on the day. Palm fronds sway and rustle in the wind. The Ocean is 50 yards from me and one would never guess the amazing life that lives just below the surface. Such beauty, amazingly, profoundly present just 30 feet under the surface. It makes me wonder what beauty lies just beneath the surface of each of us. If we only realized this….

Golden Crown of French Grunts

By Simone Lipscomb | June 1, 2014

I hung motionless in the turquoise water, silently witnessing a living, golden crown adorning a beautiful growth of elk horn coral in the white sand bottom. That’s how the Sea is….alive, moving, breathing as one with all Her creatures. The French grunts with their golden stripes schooled and moved as one being, swaying with the surge of the water column. I too moved only as the water moved me, hanging so peaceful in saltwater reverie.

That’s why I dive…Oneness. It’s never about how far I go or how long I stay underwater but only about the experience of being part of the underwater world, a witness to the immense capacity for life found in the Ocean.

I awoke to the sweet sounds of a warbler perched in the palm tree outside my window. In the dark, pre-dawn quietness–while most of the place is still sleeping–trills and warbles pierced the silence and brought me from the dreamtime. In that land between sleep and waking, the palm leaves rustled their staccato swishing and began the song of the dawn.

A faint glow called to the artist in me so I unpacked my camera, grabbed my tripod and headed to the water. As I stepped outside it felt like I was un-peeling another layer of civilization and properness and expectations from myself and entering into the elemental world of Bonaire that my soul answers to with opening…unfolding…deep breaths….unbounded gratitude.

Standing in soft, cool sand, sound again spoke to me in the tinkling of coral bits in the gentle surf, the wind gently whistling and tossing my hair, water swooshing and moving itself up to my feet. Music of the dawn, calling me to connect with elemental spirits of air, water, fire and earth. There is no other place that calls so strongly to my soul.

Later….a frog fish, master of camouflage presented himself to me. A large peacock flounder, another being perfectly capable of rending herself hidden on the reef, lay quietly waiting. A tiny, precious little moray eel, yellow and black and no longer than a few inches, caused rapturous joy to erupt from within. This life….this immense Ocean of life…is the lifeblood of Earth and I, a daughter of the sea, felt my heart singing hymns of worship.

Later still….I knelt at the clear, warm water’s edge seeking bits of sea glass. But really, truly I simply wanted to connect with the silence within myself as the saltwater caressed me, nurtured me and reminded me of fins and scales, and seaweed hair that are features that define me…mermaid….daughter of Poseidon…lover of the Sea.

Around my flowing, seaweed hair swims a crown of fish as I swim beside a grandmother sea turtle. There is no separation. There is only Oneness.