Floating: Bringing it All Together

Floating on the breast of the ocean, lifting in the slow surge and counter-surge to and from the beach, I feel like Gulliver all alone on a strange, moving continent. The water buoys me up like a solid element, yet my ears and hands and feet are in it, cool, but sun-warm. I smell unseen fish and taste the salt in my nostrils. I hear the sound of the whole ocean crackling in my ears like a million tiny crustaceans dashing themselves against a reef, all in stereo, inside my head.
Turning my feet into the approaching wave, I see them rise into it first, and my head follows bonelessly. The surface as it comes toward me in the late afternoon light is bubbling silver. I breast the wave and sink, breast the wave and sink, rising and subsiding like an eel.

I am no fool: I know there is danger below. In my mask and snorkel in other waters I have steered around the rocks, and I have followed sharks and rays and morays. But here I am caught between the deeps of ocean and the deeps of heaven, pinned on the surface, safe in a sandwich of sea and sky. If I squint into the setting sun my eyelashes make a rainbow, and I am making my own magic.

© Sandra Shaw Homer, 2015

Photo by SSH

Photo by SSH

About SSH

Philadelphia native and graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and Cornell, Shaw Homer has lived in Costa Rica for over 30 years, where she has taught languages and worked for environmental NGOs. In addition to writing for the local press, her fiction, creative nonfiction and poetry have appeared in both print and on-line literary and travel journals, as well as on her blog, writingfromtheheart.net. Her travel memoir, Letters from the Pacific, received excellent Kirkus and Publishers Weekly reviews. Her most recent book is Evelio’s Garden: Memoir of a Naturalist in Costa Rica. She and all her books can be found at www.sandrahomer.com.

2 thoughts on “Floating: Bringing it All Together

  1. Jude says:

    What lovely sensations as I drift into my nap. Thank you, Ssndy.

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