Thursday 7 January 2010

A year above uncertain ground - resolutions, regulators and failing to establish neutral buoyancy

2009 began and ended in the ocean. It began on a beach in Rio and ended in the sea off a little island in Indonesia. In Rio I wore white for peace, and as the world took its first few breaths of 2009, I made a wish and threw flowers into the water for Iemanja, the Goddess of the Sea. I remember wishing, and I remember throwing the flowers so that Iemanja would grant me her blessings in return. But I have no idea what I wished for. It’s funny how you can ask for things and then you can’t even remember whether you were given them or not.



2010 began with a swim off a little island in Indonesia that you can walk all the way around. In the water with a Bintang in hand, I wore a black bikini, or perhaps it was the one with red polka dots, I’m not sure... the colour is only important to the extent that it wasn’t green. Indonesia also has a goddess of the sea - Nyai Loro Kidul - and green is her colour. People who dare to wear green risk being dragged under the surface and out to sea, never to be seen again. And that was not the new beginning I was after.

So here we are, safe from sea goddesses, a few days into a fresh-smelling year. New beginnings are a good time to be hopeful and ambitious. To giggle at how ridiculously you’ve behaved and to hope you can keep it going for another year. To seize on opportunities to be well and truly, completely and heart-fully, free of old spent love. To be self indulgent and think about all the things that have happened, and try to establish a few things you may have learnt.

The past year has been one of extremes. I’ve lived in a country where the air is always either slippery with heat or dry with artificially conditioned air; where the world is either blaringly loud or eerily quiet; where spaces are either packed with people and rubbish or entirely empty but for the resounding prayers; where the sky is either resolutely dry or entirely unhinged. And when it’s raining then it’s pouring.

This year a lot of things happened under the pelting of hard-surfaced raindrops, and some of them were chest-leapingly wonderful.

This year I learnt that actions of affection, when made truthfully, feel like you’re operating the machinery of life.

This year I discovered new sweat glands and gave them a very good work out.

This year I felt the floor shift and loosen beneath my feet and I looked out of my 28th floor apartment to watch the Jakarta skyline move pendulously from side to side. This year I learnt what you’re meant to do when the tectonic plates misbehave.

This year a friend - an old friend whose path had since separated from mine, a lovely friend with the most simple, happiness-hunting intentions – passed away. He passed away unexpectedly, very far away, in a manner that was quiet and undramatic. With distance, I felt the sadness of this in a pure sort of way. This year I learnt how easy it is to let people drift in and out of your life without consciously choosing to set them free or hitch them tighter. One of my resolutions is to deliberately choose the people who surround me – to leave some people in 2009 and the years preceding it, and to draw others in tighter, lashed near me as we head into 2010 and beyond.

This year, fittingly, I breathed underwater for the very first time. I learnt to dive just days after the Jakarta bombings and I remember feeling like I had found a trapdoor to another dimension. And I remember how freeing that was.

I wrote this about what I found: diving is like descending into a magic eye picture; as you slowly slide under the surface, the awkward weight of the equipment fades away and the chaos of the earth-bound world is slowly squeezed out. The pressure of the water envelopes you and the atmosphere thickens into a thrilling embrace. You’re suspended around layers and layers of fish- little darts of colour rushing and wallowing, chasing and nipping each other, shooting spurts of yellow shit behind them. Everywhere you look there are great civilisations under the sea, factories of activity, fish coming and going, currents pushing and pulling like invisible conveyor belts, and all around there are the sounds of little crunches and pings as coral cracks and fish munch. There are caverns and outcrops and on the bottom of the sea sit lavender mounds of enormous clams and spiky yellow cactus plants. There are giant sea turtles and cuttlefish and tiny, delicate dancing shrimp. You swim alongside your dive-master and she points urgently behind you - directly behind you – so you swing around and *squeal* into your regulator at the sight of a dugong moving determinedly through the blue abyss beyond, its square face nudging the currents. You clap your hands at the sight of an eagle ray swooping above you, and emit little yelps of glee at being caught in a storm of multicoloured fish, little flecks of life darting and drifting in every direction in suspended fish schools, with rebel castaways zooming past your ears and through your legs.

It’s all you can do to keep breathing (because if you don’t your head will explode, or something like that – I learnt it in the course). You just keep drawing the enriched air in and out with excited gasps and hope that you never have to re-enter the world above - the only evidence of which is the shafts of shifting light searching for the bottom of the earth. You’ll try (and mostly fail) to establish neutral buoyancy – a beautiful state where you are perfectly weighted so can stay still in the sea and move without fuss from one place to another. Neutral buoyancy involves weights around your waist and then filling your jacket with just the right amount of air... you can even move from place to place simply by the intake and exhalation of oxygen from your tank – filling your lungs will make you rise, and then letting it out will make you lower. It's a delicious prospect. You’ll watch others do this with impeccable precision while you flail about ridiculously, shooting up and down, high and low. It should not surprise you in the least that you have trouble establishing and maintaining neutral buoyancy.

I remember when I dived for the first time, an hour underwater passed in moments. When we returned to the surface it seemed like madness to re-enter this world, with all its gravity-entrapped bumblings and unpredictable, awful possibilities. On the surface, with my inflated jacket bobbing me afloat and another dimension stretching deep below my flippers, I felt all the weight of my equipment become real again. I felt the urge to follow that glinting light - past the teeming fish families in their underwater villages - deep into the caverns of the earth.

This year I learnt that sometimes life is hard above an uncertain ground.

A few days ago I did my first dive of the decade and this time it felt different. I breached the sea surface, swelled my floatation jacket and leaned back to turn my face to a friendly shining sky, arching over a renewed world.

Later, the clouds would bunch and pick up the yellow of another ending day and then settle over the ancient volcanoes that carved out the landscape so many lifetimes ago ... and there I was, floating in the middle of it all after an hour of breathing underwater.

This year I learnt that we live in a world of wonderful possibility.

And for 2010, I wish the most wonderful things for all the amazing people in my life, who I’ve just hitched a little tighter.

---

The Brazilian author, Jorge Amado, wrote:

The ocean is large, the sea is a road without end, waters make up more than half the world, they are three-quarters of it, and all that belongs to Iemanjá. There she combs her hair (beautiful slave girls come with combs of silver and ivory), hears the prayers of the women of the sea, unleashes storms, chooses the men she is to take on the bottomless journey to the depths of the sea. And it is here that her feast takes place. Because the night of the feast of Iemanjá is a thing of beauty. On those nights the sea is of a color between blue and green, the moon is always in the sky, the stars accompany the lanterns on the sloops, Iemanjá slowly spreads her hair out toward the sea and there is nothing in the world as beautiful (sailors on big ships that travel all over always say) than the color that emerges from the mingling of Iemanjá's hair with the sea.


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