What Lies Beneath~ Diving into the belly of the planet
When you ask most divers why they took up diving, you’ll hear the same thing repeatedly:
1) It’s the last frontier
2) They can’t afford to go to space but they can afford to dive in the ocean
3) They want to experience weightlessness
I took up diving because I am a pragmatic Capricorn:
1) I am afraid of the open ocean. I hate having things around that scare me.
2) This past new year eve I promised myself I would make two commitments to the land. The first was going to be a commitment of time and resource to an organization. (I selected The Woman’s Earth Alliance because I am inspired by the organization’s mission and leaders.) The second promise was that I would focus on one environmental issue that I could have a hands on relationship with. The first thought that came to mind was the images of sea turtles drowning in plastic and getting caught by fishing lines. So I figured what better way to engage than to go into the great mystery of the ocean: source of life, of food, holder of our garbage… and take on the simple project of removing the garbage that I am personally responsible for? (There has to be a stat for that.)
3) I made a new years resolution to have more fun, and I do believe this will fit in that category.
And… the ocean just so happens to be the place whales calls home. I like whales. After all, they are the only mammal that has migrated out of the water, onto land, and back into the water.
I think I feared the ocean because I couldn’t see into it, all I could imagine was a deep dark place teaming with wild creatures prepared and waiting to eat me if I don’t eat them first. Ok, actually, all I could imagine are dead zombies waiting just inches beneath the surface of the water waiting to pull my feet to the bottom of the ocean. But the fact that 71 percent of the planet is covered in water, and that there is this entire world under just under the surface that has volcanoes and deserts and valleys got the best of me~
…so I got my diving certification. I started at my local dive shop in San Francisco, but my schedule didn’t match up with their open water training schedule so I went down to Monterey for the first two open water dives, and then completed my last 2 dives in Maui. While slightly unorthodox to go through 3 different dive shops for my certification (if this of interest, I appreciated each and everyone: The Dive Shop in SF, the one in Monterey (yeah kelp forest), and then finished the open water certification at the Maui Dive Shop in Maui (Juan, my teacher, had the patience of a saint)). I actually appreciated and benefited from the exposure to different teachers, different equipment, and different teaching styles. I’ll also confess that given that I got into this due to my deep seeded fear of the deep dark ocean, I liked the one-on-one attention I received in these individual classes, and eventually managed to succeed at what I now refer to as the highly prized skill of selective thinking.
For me, diving begins on the surface: you begin by floating, then release all the air from BC, and then start the process of sinking to the bottom. It’s in that moment when looking through the goggles: in the top half I can see the sky, in the bottom half I see into the ocean, that I think, “I could die doing this.”
And that’s when I start the process of selective thinking. Just as when you are afraid of heights, they tell you don’t look down, I quickly learned not to look up. It is like the container has disappeared and all of a sudden you are in a new planet where there is no end of the world (and btw, no zombies).
There are some things that are used on the surface of the planet that are useless and pointless once inside the belly of the ocean, and time is one of them. I now understand why they teach you to obsessively check your gauge: because once you enter this other world, it’s easy to forget you need to return.
The things I had seen and feared turned out to be fine: eels and sharks I swam with turned out turned out be harmless, and after swimming past my first shark in the wild, all I had to do was remind myself that it’s name was not jaws.
I became aware that I was the one that could harm this place, and not the other way around. All it took was one moment of carelessness with my fins or fingers, just one touch to the coral and I could kill it. No matter how many times I understand it with my brain, my eyes do not register that that huge rock like structure is by all practical definition an extremely fragile living animal.
It’s hard to comprehend that I was swimming in the belly of one of the sources that sustains this planet.
It’s bazaar to comprehend that we have spent less time and resources exploring the oceans than we have space, that every time the deep water expedition goes down they discover new things.
It’s surreal to imagine that this place which has become a place that feels serene and safe is also a death trap with wayward nets that are killing turtles and dolphins, and that each day it takes in a little more plastics and toxins.
The only rules I need to abide by are don’t run out of air, and stay with my partner. Other than that, there are no rules, road signs, right of way, traffic lines, it’s one of the few places you can go on the planet that isn’t regulated. There is space, plenty of space, space to get lost in, a quiet that allows you to get lost in your imagination, in your thoughts, if you can manage to distract yourself from the crazy foot dance of the fish that can’t swim (who knew?) and the pencil fish, and the moray eel, and the parrot fish, and the dolphins, and the mantas…and somewhere out there, the largest beings that have ever lived on this planet are out there, swimming in the same body of water that I am swimming in.
(many thanks to Jack’s Diving Locker for providing the video footage)
While visiting Maui, I was given a tour of 
Today’s guest blogger is Chef Mark Tafoya, a world traveler and self-taught gourmand. Mark has learned about many world cuisines first-hand, and mastered many of his recipes at the source. As Executive Producer of the 
