Our natural world is understandable, yet still fascinating and mysterious. We have established a plastic rigidity to our understanding of the modern world, the human structures present, the laws of the universe, the theory of evolution. But, the plastic rigidity just seems like a way for us to mask the truth of the matter. That we have no way of fully comprehending our universe, not through a lack of trying but just being who we are: human. We are relatively insignificant in the grand scheme of things. Our total of human history only represents a fraction of the cosmic calendar. We have only been around for the last minute of the universe’s 13.7-billion-year time scale. That fact already seems like it’s stretching our understanding of the word. But sometimes because of that fact, we need to learn to accept the unexplainable, whether we chalk it up to science we haven’t understood yet or just plain magic that is practiced by higher beings or different species.
We need to allow the mystery to take us on a journey not just for our bodies and minds, but for our souls. Humans have insignificant lifespans compared to the lifespan of the universe. We live our lives trying to make the most of it before our deaths. But while we live, many of us try to silence the part of ourselves that we use to hear the creativity and imagination and wonder, when we should engage with that innate part of ourselves.
Spending time in the natural world in my childhood helped to engage that wonder and imagination.I learned to swim outside not just in a pool, but in a pond, learning to swim in the natural waters. The body of water is called Learned’s Pond, a kettle pond that was formed from the retreat of the glaciers from New England 11,000 years ago. Throughout history, many people settled near the pond. The Nipmuc found the area around the pond to be a pleasant place to settle down. Once the Europeans arrived, the neighborhood around Learned’s Pond became a farming community, one of which is called Isaac Learned Farm, which becomes the namesake of the pond. One legend was about a resident of the Warren Oaks neighborhood named Joseph Brandish Jr, who served on a merchant ship. He eventually led a mutiny against the captain and became a pirate captain. His life ended with imprisonment and hanging, but during his time in English jail, he was the cellmate of Captain William Kidd whose treasure is rumored to be buried on the shores of Learned Pond to this day. As a kid, me and my friends would try to dig through the sand and dive deeper into the water to try to find the treasure. We, unfortunately, never found the treasure, but people are still looking to this day.
The town hosted weekly summer swimming lessons that I attended during elementary school. I would remember wading through the water to climb up onto the metal docks that would be dragged out of storage every summer. The docks would shift under your weight as you walk. They were high and thick enough not to topple over, but it still is a surreal feeling to be essentially walking on top of the water. The docks were shaped like an H, allowing a divide between the shallows and the deep end. The lifeguards would usually lookout on the docks in the middle of the H.
After learning how to swim, I decided to join the town swim team. There are two different seasons, winter and summer. During the summer season, there are many different places you swim in. Some pools are indoors like my home pool at Keefe Technical School. But, others are outdoors. My main stroke is the backstroke. While other strokes are easy to duplicate when outside, backstroke can be a bit of a mess. Usually, when one does the backstroke indoors, you can usually rely on the ceiling to keep yourself in a straight line. But, there is no ceiling when outdoors. You only have the sky, making the swimmer rely exclusively on their stroke count to make sure that they don’t smash their head into the wall.
But no matter if you’re swimming in an inside or outside pool, the threat of lightning seizes all activity. Unless your indoor pool is insolated, you are forced out of the pool and made to wait for about a half-hour. For every crash of thunder heard, another thirty minutes is added. One time when during a summer swim meet away at Newton, thunder was heard in the distance. I don’t recall if the meet had already started or if we were only on warmups before the meet, but, it doesn’t really matter. The storm was coming in and we were forced inside. Newton is one of the wealthiest communities in Massachusetts. But, its human wealth didn’t matter in this situation. We were only subjected to the natural elements, no matter our socioeconomic status. We were forced to reside in the bathhouse while we waited out the thunderstorm. We were hunched together to prevent being near anything in the bathhouse that could hurt us which is hard to do in a bathhouse where water is central to the structure’s function and there were electricity rushing through the bathhouse.
Electricity powers our modern world. It’s fascinating to think that being able to type that on a computer really puts that into perspective. My computer’s circuitry is run on electricity and currently, it’s plugged into an outlet that can charge it just like that. There’s no need to change out the batteries like other devices. The charging process provides the battery with enough power to survive. Our bodies are even powered with electricity, neurons connecting to one another so that we can stay alive.
Ultimately, electricity is something that feels primordial because it ties back to a phenomenon that still fascinates us to this day: lightning. Lightning is the original manifestation of electricity. Its power is unmatched in our eyes, even with reason and logic and science trying to curb that. The mythology, the lore, and the qualities we grant this phenomenon are unparalleled. Weather gods themselves are manifestations of this primordial and almost divine, if not divine by itself, fascination with the mysteries of weather.
There’s a tradition in Indo-European religions as far-reaching as India with Hinduism and continuous to be found as one travels west through Europe to Spain and Portugal to the west and the islands and Nordic countries to the North. Weather gods are seen as powerful and near supreme in their power, often becoming the archetypal sky father, whether Zeus or Thor or Horus or Dagr or others who don’t perfectly fit this archetype or come from cultures not part of this shared mythological spread of traditions. Those traditions have been spread beyond as people travel and chat and make connections to each other, making humanity more interconnected than ever. That spread of ideas has coincided with the spread of electricity as the reason why that spread can exist, tying the cultural back into the technological.
Lightning is still power, even when diluted to fit into our modern conveniences. One single spark of electricity in the home can do the same damage as a bolt of lightning can do in the forest. We can treat lightning as any other element, one in which its benevolence saves us, or its apathy destroys us. Fire can warm us and be used for creation but snuff us out through burning through everything, branding or killing us. Earth is our stability, our provider, but it’s ever moving and changing, causing changes that can ultimately harm us such as avalanches or earthquakes. Air is how we live, our breath, but it can be removed and be used to further the chaos that is the weather, something that even the scientists studying the phenomena admit the unpredictability. Water is in our blood, both literally and metaphorically, but the ocean scares us.
Our land is an exception on this planet, not a rule. We see the vastness of the plains and steppes, the steepness and grandeur of mountains, and the deepest depths in canyons. The rainforests are home to so much life, concentrating all this evolution in plants, insects, birds, amphibians, mammals and so many other living things into several parts of the world, all along an invisible line that is determined as to where solar radiation is the strongest on the entire planet.
But, all of this, the variety, our history, our cultures, the diversity in life, the beauty found, is only representative of less than a quarter of the planet. It’s evident when you can see it, but we are an ocean planet. Not to the extent of Uranus and Neptune could be with their possible subsurface oceans along with the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. The blueness that completely covers their outer appearance in space that isn’t achievable by us with our green and brown continents. But, being the Planet Oceanus really strikes us deeply. That exploring the world and traveling that world only skims the surface of what is found on this planet but even what is deeper under the surface. Traveling the ocean will only let you see the surface when the mystery of the ocean is not just its size but the depth that can swallow our greatest inventions whole. Our technical marvels end up in the ocean one way or another.
Training underwater helps to train astronauts into going into space, creating the parallel of a form of space not yet seen by humans that is on our planet. Many of our satellites and returning rockets crash into the ocean, whether to be recovered or let them be consumed and sunk to form another piece of human garbage. Whether it will be added to the wasteful miles upon miles that we have already dumped, forming a mythical Giant Pacific Garbage Patch that is not as visible and clear as the name seems to suggest. Swallowing our ships and our people whole through icebergs and rogue waves, filling them up with water that seems to be ever-filling.
Our tiny vessel is no match to the matriarchs and patriarchs governing our ocean with gallons filling up the Lusitania and the Titanic in mere hours. A rogue wave can tip over a boat with a sturdy and wide base, weighing hundreds of thousands of tons, turning off all the engines and power systems to leave it to the elements to be swallowed. All unforgiving towards the poor souls trapped aboard. This boat, this vessel is the only thing keeping them from having to comprehend the incomprehensibility of our vast, deep ocean. It’s separating us from being pulled down deeper and deeper until we are completely swallowed up by the water as it rushes into our bodies, chocking us to have us to join its watery grave it’s made for us on where we stop whether sinking down to be decomposed on the seafloor or on a continental shelf or lay on top of a volcanic mid-ocean ridge. Our bodies are decomposed and used to further the life found here and in which we had ultimately come from. In a way, drowning in the ocean becomes a return to the primordial soup that created us.
