Swimming with the Fishes
I took a deep breath and yanked my snorkel mask down over my eyes and nose, painfully snagging my wet hair in the process. I slipped the snorkel into my mouth and tasted the ocean, but I didn’t immediately peek underwater. Instead, I stood in the lagoon and focused on my breathing. In and out. Deep and even. Nice and slow. The last time I had snorkeled, things hadn’t gone so well. It had been at least 12 years since then, but I remembered it all too well. The feeling of claustrophobia for someone who’d never been claustrophobic in her life. The sensation of not being able to get enough air, no matter how much I filled my lungs. The primal fear of drowning. Fuck the fish. Snorkeling was not in my wheelhouse.
But here we were in Hawaii for the fourth time. The older I get, the more determined I become to conquer my fears. Between my last snorkeling experience and this one, I’d rappelled into a golden eagle’s nest on the side of a mountain with a group of strangers. I’d flown in a biplane — twice. I’d been in a hot-air balloon accident. I’d sat in a cage with rambunctious baby tigers. I’d hiked past quicksand in 110-degree heat. It was time to put my head in the water and see what all the fuss was about.
I glanced over my shoulder at our cabana a couple hundred feet away on the shore. I could see my book and my oversized sunglasses and the empty glass that had held a mai tai just a few minutes ago. Next to me, Daniel asked if I was ready, but I could tell he had his doubts. He, too, was remembering the last time I tried to snorkel. With a nod of my head, I ducked under the warm water and kicked off the bottom, propelled by just the right amount of liquid courage. The first sensation I remember was the warm sun on my back and the cool water on my front. The Gemini in me appreciated the duality of it.
From there on out, it was all about the silence.
Under the water, the only thing I could hear was my own breath, steady and deep, lulling me into a meditative state. The sound of my breath was a soundtrack, something that wasn’t coming from my body but somewhere outside of it. It was rhythmic and reassuring and so calm. My body was weightless, supported by the ocean, all tension gone. I gave myself to the swells that rocked me like a baby, to the sound of my breathing, to a sensation that I can only describe as womb-like.
I floated out into deeper water, and that’s when I saw the sea turtle, a gentle giant suspended in a brackish area where the salty sea met a freshwater stream. If he noticed me, he paid me no heed. I watched as Daniel followed him, but I turned the other way and ventured into even greater depths. I noticed the sandy bottom of the lagoon far below with detachment and absolutely zero trepidation. I begin following schools of fish that I hadn’t seen since my parents dabbled with a saltwater aquarium when I was in my early teens. Suddenly, names and fish facts that I hadn’t thought about in 20 years popped into my mind. There goes an angelfish — they change colors as they mature. There’s the blue tang and the yellow tang. The rainbow colors of the parrot fish glowed in the sunlight filtering through the water. And then, out of a crack in the coral, the yellow and black stripes of the elusive moorish idol, my mom’s favorite fish, appeared.
This was the fish that was nearly impossible to keep alive in captivity. I’d watched more than one die in that aquarium. And yet here she was, swimming behind a school of yellow tangs. I followed her until I could no longer follow her, the child in me in awe, the adult in me fully present. The only thing that existed was my breathing, the lagoon and the moorish idol.
I live in what is arguably the meditation capital of the country, and I’ve never been able to meditate. Forget that woo-woo shit. I fall asleep. I get bored. I feel dumb. I become frustrated. But there’s no doubt I found my meditative state that day in a fish-filled lagoon on the west coast of the Big Island of Hawaii. Time lost all meaning. I’m not sure how long I floated in a trance. Two hours maybe. I remember pulling my head out of the water long enough to see Daniel beckoning me from our cabana. Time to give back the snorkel gear. He had long since returned to shore, mai tai No. 2 in hand. He said he watched as I swam in circles around the lagoon, mildly shocked that he was watching the same person who couldn’t even keep her head in the water when we visited Maui on our honeymoon.
Maybe it was a combination of age and stubbornness. Maybe it was the mai tai. But for years after, whenever anyone would ask me about my Happy Place (a common occurrence in the Meditation Capital), I would think about that lagoon and feel at peace.
