“A world full of billions of people who understand their eco-distress as super-fuel, and who have allowed their feelings to meaningfully reshape the deepest parts of themselves, is health by another name.” - Britt Wray, Generation Dread
I am seventy feet underwater, staring up at the shimmering surface above me, with only the air in my lungs sustaining me. A golden ray of light flows down serpent-like, diagonally through the deep azure around me. Swimming in the depths of this cave, immersed in this vast liquid body of water, I get an inkling of insight on what draws me to the subject of collapse.
Morbid fascination with death or decay? No. A hunch as to how things will turn out? I wish, but no. It’s something simpler, and more elusive. It’s got to do with curiosity. Curiosity about our planet and its current state and direction. Curiosity about my own biases as I try to integrate what is happening to me personally and to us collectively. The curiosity of not knowing what the future has in store and the accompanying sense of wonder for the present.
To think about collapse, as I do when I dive deep underwater, is to wonder about the meaning of our experience on this Earth. The philosopher Albert Camus wrote, with typical French existentialist gravitas, that “there is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.” For Camus, contemplating suicide and death was a responsibility we owed to life: how can you fully appreciate the gifts of being alive if you don’t recognize that you will die, if you don’t wonder about human extinction?
In a speech to the 2005 graduating class of Kenyon College, the writer David Foster Wallace, tells the story of two young fish who meet an older fish that says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” The young fish swim on for a bit, until one of them looks at the other and says “What the hell is water?” The story is short; the metaphor simple. We often don’t appreciate what we are immersed in, what we are made of, what we are connected to. In fact, the more essential something is to our life, the less we think of it, which is why we don’t think about the air we breathe, even though we respire over 20,000 times per day.
“The only way out is through” goes a common saying in Buddhist spirituality. If we are to learn how to navigate collapse, we may first have to start by allowing ourselves to feel what is happening to our planet and so to ourselves; because at the heart of the polycrisis is an inability to feel our interconnection with the planet and all it contains.
Seventy feet underwater, my insight is that feeling into the breakdown of our social-ecological systems also constitutes a way to connect with the beauty, complexity, and mystery of life on Earth. The author Martin Prechtel shares that “Grief is praise, because it is the natural way love honors what it misses.” Diving underwater, holding my breath for minutes at a time, I feel this grief and praise simultaneously, and they bring fresh air to my world.
I had come to the Yucatan Peninsula, that bit of Mexico that juts out into the Caribbean Sea, to train how to dive underwater using only my breath, a practice known as freediving. Flying into Cancun Airport, the landscape below looked like a moist, shaggy carpet of greenish-gray trees, interrupted here and there by communication towers, sliced through by highways, and punctuated by low-rise settlements. The Yucatan Peninsula is a vast limestone plain that connects southeastern Mexico, northern Guatemala, and Belize. That limestone is a key reason why the area is such a mecca for divers of all kinds, both the scuba divers who rely on bottled air and the freedivers who work only with their breath.
Limestone is composed primarily of calcium carbonate, the primary ingredient in the shells of eggs, snails, shellfish, and many other natural materials such as pearls and chalk. Limestone is partially soluble in water. As it is exposed to water - whether in the form of rain, waves, or rivers - it erodes over time, creating stunning cliff edges, deep ravines, and caves. Most cave systems across the planet are formed as water wears away at underground weak spots in the limestone, gradually creating larger and larger cavities and channels.
From the plane, I can’t spot any rivers in the landscape because the Yucatan has no rivers. Instead of running on the surface and collecting into streams and rivers, the rainwater here percolates into the limestone bedrock and gathers into the world’s most extensive underground network of caves, with one cave measured at over 347 kilometers in length.
Sometimes, the roof of these caves collapses, and the water within is exposed to the air above, forming deep open-sky wells known as cenotes. The cenotes of the Yucatan attract divers from all over the world because their waters are calm and deeply transparent. Sunken beneath the surrounding forest, wind doesn’t disturb the surface. Because cenote water is filtered through the limestone, it contains little suspended particulate matter. Good visibility and stable conditions. In other words, a diver’s dream.
On a sunny morning, I walk through a quiet, leafy residential neighborhood in the seaside resort city of Playa del Carmen and find the building I’m looking for. I push through the creaky gate and enter Pranamaya, the local freediving school, to start a three day intro course to freediving. The name of the school is an ingenious wordplay of pranayama, the yogic practice of breathwork. My freediving instructor, Claudio, is an Argentine who spends the warm season running a freediving school on the other side of Mexico, in Baja California, and the rest of the year teaching in Yucatan. He is tall, thin, and muscular, and has the weather-worn calm of a man who spends a good chunk of his life under the sun and in the ocean. He seems friendly and genuinely excited in introducing me and the other two students to freediving.
Freediving is an ancient practice; in fact, until the advent of scuba diving, it was the only way to spend significant time underwater. Across the world, people living by the sea have learned to hunt and forage underwater for sustenance and trade. Pearl hunting by freedivers was a core part of the economy of diverse cultures, from Japan to the Philippines and the Persian Gulf. Because of the prominence of freediving in their lives, some people have even evolved special genetic adaptations. A 2018 study showed that the spleens of the Bajau people of southeast Asia are 50 per cent larger than those of a neighboring land-based group. When the spleen contracts underwater, it releases more oxygen-rich blood allowing the Bajau to dive longer underwater.
But as a recreational practice in the West, freediving is still relatively new. Until the mid 20th century, most specialists assumed the human body would implode at pressures beyond 30 meters. But over and over again, intrepid divers pushed past what was thought possible, and, today, the world record dive using only fins as an aid stands at 420 feet or 129 meters, roughly the length of the Statue of Liberty. The sport exploded in popularity in the 2010s, aided by a slew of books and movies, and today a handful of international organizations have standardized the practice and education of freediving.
The goal of my three day beginner’s course is to understand the basic physiological principles that allow us to hold our breath, dive underwater, and re-emerge safely. If everything went well, we would finish the course capable of comfortably swimming to a depth of 12 meters (40 feet), or roughly the length of a 4 story building. That goal felt impossible to me. “Don’t worry,” Claudio said with his smooth Argentinian twang, “it’s not a competition. We’ll go one step at a time.”
I was first drawn to freediving through dazzling cinematic youtube videos of freedivers gliding underwater, seemingly unperturbed by gravity. Yes, it’s true; the internet brought me here. The minimalism of those videos appealed to me: solitary bodies floating in what seemed like infinity, and with little to no equipment necessary, only a wetsuit, eye mask, and fins. Freediving appeared - at least from the high-production videos I was watching - to offer a unique combination of freedom of motion, physical challenge, and direct, unmediated contact with the natural elements. I was hooked, but also terrified.
I would watch the videos - like most people- holding my breath, in a mixture of fear and awe, never thinking I would try it. The very idea of being underwater and not able to breath gave me mild panic attacks. It brought me back to childhood nightmares of drowning in dark, uncaring waters, suffocated by angry waves, lost and tragically forgotten. I suppose my curiosity eventually got the upper hand. The freedivers I saw online raved about the sense of calm connection they felt underwater, as if all the troubles in the world became a distant worry. I wondered whether a way to understand my fear of deep water was quite literally to immerse myself in it... Instead of getting rid of my fear, could I engage it, even befriend it?
For something that we do so often, one would think we would be experts in breathing. But fear seems to thrive on ignorance, and we take the most common things for granted. Thankfully, on day one of the course, Claudio, with his charismatic calm, helped allay my fears. Standing in front of a white board in the dimly lit living room of the diving school, he shared the four stages of a freediver’s breath hold. Each stage corresponds to a different, protective instinct of the body. “If you understand and respect the natural responses of your body to holding your breath” he emphasized, “you’ll have no problem freediving.”
Upon inhaling a lungful of air, you don’t feel the desire to breathe for some moment; this is the comfort phase. When the desire emerges is the beginning of the second, or negotiation, phase. From a physiological perspective, you aren’t in danger; you aren’t low on oxygen. Your body simply responds to increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the blood with the urge to breathe. It’s called the negotiation phase because you can be in conversation with your mind, negotiating with it, to remind it that there is no real emergency.
Gradually, carbon dioxide levels in the blood continue to rise, amplifying the urge to breathe. At the same time, oxygen levels in the blood lower enough that the abdominal area starts to spasm in small contractions. It’s the body’s next instinctual layer of defense, trying to force air out of the lungs so that fresh air can come back in. It’s called the “fight” phase because you still aren’t in danger at this point: by learning to relax the body, the onset of the contractions can be significantly delayed and you can learn to tolerate them more easily. If you start having contractions underwater at depth, it’s time to make your way back to the surface.
If one keeps pushing through the contractions, the body eventually blacks out. This is the fourth stage, and yet another instinctual, protective response of the body. During a black out, the body stops breathing and shuts down all functions that aren’t immediately needed for survival. After a few minutes of blackout, the body will try its final protective mechanism: a forced exhale and an inhalation. If you’re underwater, that can mean drowning. If you’re above the surface, it means another breath.
After reviewing more theory, Claudio leads us to the sunny roof of the school, where we splay out on yoga mats for a bit of stretching and relaxation exercises. Claudio incorporates yogic exercises into his freediving training; it’s a way of relaxing the body and preparing ourselves for holding our breaths. Calm body and mind are necessary to actually enjoy freediving. And so, with dogs barking, palm trees rustling, and muffled reggaeton music playing in the background, we start with a simple breath-hold to see how long we can comfortably last. The goal is not to set a record, but to familiarize ourselves with our limits and the experience of withholding breathing.
“Ok, 3, 2, 1, go!” says Claudio. The first 20 seconds fly by like a breeze. When I feel a desire to breathe, I try to simply relax and scan my body for tension as instructed by Claudio. I have to remind myself that the desire to breathe at this point is just that, a desire, not an actual need. After a minute or so of this internal dialogue, the contractions start. These are harder to negotiate with as the urge to breathe becomes increasingly intense and unbearable. Trying to relax in these conditions feels impossible, like a mind-bending paradox. For a few seconds, I wonder what I am doing self-torturing myself on a yoga mat in Mexico, before remembering this isn’t a competition. Just over two minutes into the experience, I exhale and breathe in the fresh air. I’m still there, in one piece. Phew.
Later that day, we repeat the experience face down in a shallow pool, with pool toys to help us float comfortably in the water so we can fully relax our bodies. We go one at a time, with Claudio standing at our sides, guardian angel-style, encouraging us to relax, testing our limbs to see if we are holding tension or not: “Let go of your neck…let go of your jaw…let go of your legs…there, you got it, just let go…”
Doing the exercise in water feels completely different than on our yoga mats. When cool water touches the human face, the heart rate lowers, blood is circulated away from our limbs towards the vital organs, and the spleen releases oxygen-rich blood cells. It’s called the mammalian dive response. Amazingly, we share this instinct with all marine mammals, such as dolphins, whales, and sea lions. When they dive deep into the ocean, these same mechanisms become activated, but to a much greater extent.
With the floaters supporting me, it’s easier to relax and allow my mind and body to wander. This time around, I last a full minute longer than on land. The same challenges emerge as on land, but I start to familiarize myself with the peculiar feeling of rising carbon dioxide levels in the body and with relaxing into the rising tension that a breathhold entails. “It’s a mental game,” says Claudio. “Yes, eventually you do need to breath, but until you reach that point, you have to simply relax.”
The next day, we meet at the school, pack our wetsuits, fins, and snorkel masks, and jump into the school’s white pickup truck. With Claudio at the helm and with mediocre house music playing through the truck’s ratty speakers, we drive through the concrete sprawl of Playa del Carmen. The highway south of the city is lined by all inclusive resorts with names such as Grand Palladium, El Dorado, and the Grand Oasis. Their massive gateways welcome the over 20 million tourists who visit Mexico's Riviera Maya, the tourist strip that runs from Cancun to Playa del Carmen and Tulum further south.
The Mexican federal government financed the development of Cancun from a fisherman’s island to the most well-known of Mexican resorts in the 1970s. Until then, the whole region was unknown to mass tourism, with an economy relying primarily on agriculture and fishing. Driving past the endless resorts, I notice my tendency to cast judgment on the uncontrolled, rampant development that has turned much of this coastline into a kitschy theme park; it’s the same glitzy growth I see all over the world. Traditional lifestyles get bulldozed into playgrounds for the privileged; rich biodiverse ecosystems get turned into fields of cash-crops, all in service to the wallets of developers and local authorities. I am staying in a small family-owned guesthouse and training with a school that honors the area’s unique geography. As Claudio speeds the pick-up to the speed limit of 100 km/hour, I have to consider that I too am part of the very changes that I look down on. Every meal eaten, every toilet flushed, every translation and social interaction leaves a trace.
We eventually make it to cenote Angelita, notable for its picturesque tree trunks, preserved by the water and seemingly frozen in time, at a depth of 30 meters. There are thousands of cenotes in the Yucatan Peninsula, with varying range of depth and width. They carry different names - Maravilla, el Pit, Dos Ojos- to reflect their unique characteristics. Because the cenotes provided easy access to clean freshwater in an area without rivers, they have played a central role in the practical and ceremonial lives of the Maya people, the predominant indigenous people of the Yucatan.
Important Maya settlements, such as the famous Chichen Itza, were built around these natural wells. The Maya also traditionally consider the cenotes as entrances to Xibalba, the realm of the afterlife and home to the rain god Chaac. As I walk towards the cenote, it’s not hard to understand why. From the parking lot, I walk through the dense forest barefoot on a gravel path broken up by tree roots and ant routes. The path reaches the edge of a cliff, from where I can see below to a perfectly round pool of water, the color of lapis lazuli. About 30 meters wide, it marks a clear break from the surrounding vegetation. Trees, from the cliff edge, lean over the water; some have partially fallen in. The contrast between the pool and forest makes me think of a minimalist Mark Rothko painting: blue circle, gray-green line, blue sky. It does feel like a portal. Out of precaution, I ask Chaac for safe passage through this underworld.
Claudio waits for us in the middle of the cenote by a buoy. Ten kilos of weights attached to a rope hang down in the water from the buoy, creating an underwater vertical axis onto which we can lower and raise ourselves during our exercises. We start off gently, each student lowering themselves down the rope, head up, to 5 meters depth. At that depth, we start to learn how to equalize our ears: underwater, the pressure from the water compresses the air in the ear canal, so we pinch our noses and blow into our ears to bring the pressure back to normal.
For our next dives, Claudio has us go down head first, using the rope to pull ourselves down. Before each dive, we take a minute or two to float by the buoy, relax our bodies, and declutter our minds. After this period of rest, we take a big breath and go down.
During my first dives, I am so focused on doing the exercise right that I forget Claudio’s #1 rule: relax and enjoy yourself. It’s hard to relax when I’m also learning to hold my breath, habituate myself to pressure, and calm my mind simultaneously. But Claudio’s insistence on relaxation is not just a good vibe check. It’s an essential requirement of good freediving. A fearful or anxious mind causes tension in the body, which uses up more energy and oxygen, and thus reduces time spent underwater. It’s common for beginner freedivers to obsess about how deep they can go, at the expense of how responsibly and enjoyably they dive. My freediving manual says it simply in bold letters: “Dive relaxed, or do not dive.” It’s not the most encouraging instruction, but it gets the point across.
Over the course of the day, and the next, we slowly increase our comfort with depth until we reach the 12 meter goal. After each dive, the sensation of panic and anxiety dissipates and is replaced by calm and wonder. Pulling slowly down the rope, my entire attention is focused on the points of tension in my body that emerge as I go deeper and deeper. With the rope guiding me, I do some descents eyes closed. Everything disappears during that time as I concentrate on the sensations in my body: the feeling of the cold water on my skin, the increasing pressure on my ears, the clicking sounds echoing through cenote’s water, my heart beating, as well as my own internal voices occasionally freaking out.
And, sooner than expected, my hand touches the stopper at the end of the rope, I fold forward to turn 180 degrees, and open my eyes. Beside me, a few small fish and Claudio, making sure I’m doing things right. Below me, deeper, darker waters. Above, light filtering through the speckled surface. Suspended in this watery cathedral, I feel weightless, as does my awareness, which stretches out into the waters of the cenote, following the water backwards through the labyrinthic underground rivers, up into the porous limestone bedrock, through the tangled tropical forests, into rainfall, and back into cloud. For a few seconds, I indulge in the peaceful expansiveness of those clouds until, shit, the contractions kick in, I remember where I am, and I swim back up.
The French professional freediver Guillaume Nery, who dives to depths of over 120 meters, has some interesting thoughts about freediving. “Today,” he says, “we're under so much pressure. Our minds are overworked, we think at a million miles an hour, we're always stressed. Being able to freedive lets you, just for a moment, relax your mind.”
I’m curious about this parallel Guillaume draws between the pressure of our lives and the pressure underwater. When we feel pressure on land, we tend to either ignore, relieve, or release it. But what happens when a pressure is too powerful for any of those options? What do we do when we can’t get rid of the pressure? In describing the experience of being 80 meters underwater, Guillaume says: “I let the water crush me. I accept the pressure and go with it… I relinquish all control, and relax completely. The pressure starts crushing me, and it doesn't feel bad at all. I even feel like I'm in a cocoon, protected.” I’m relieved when I first hear Guillaume’s words. Relieved to hear someone speak about the benefits of surrendering to pressure.
“Nature and the elements are stronger than you,” says Guillaume. During my time in Yucatan, these words echo in my mind. Being alive today feels like an experience of rising pressures coming from multiple predicaments. We are asked to be resilient, to develop tough skin to the dis-ease of our times. But listening to Guillaume, I wonder what it would feel to get crushed. Could I surrender without breaking apart? Not a surrender that gives up, but rather one that accepts.
What’s so endlessly appealing to me about freediving is how exposed one is to the watery surroundings. Without all the gear that scuba divers are forced to carry, freedivers have no choice but to practice humility in the water. That humility, ironically, requires training, as freedivers learn to habituate their bodies to new pressures, turning discomfort into comfort, so that they have the freedom underwater to enjoy the experience.
As I continued to train in the days after the course, I would reach a limit, a depth that I couldn’t go beyond. Typically, it was caused by me not being able to equalize my ears, or because my mind would start playing games with me. Every freediver reaches a limit: it’s the point at which your body and mind are not capable of enduring the stress. Going beyond that limit requires accepting the stress, feeling it.
This training process is not a switch that suddenly turns on. It’s more like a muscle strengthened over time by paying attention to what the body is saying and developing a healthy skepticism for narratives that emerge from the mind. During my dives, I would occasionally have contractions on my way down, early enough that it was clearly a result of stress rather than a need to breath. I needed time to understand the difference between what my mind was saying was real and what my body was saying. Over time, I started relaxing more deeply and the contractions disappeared.
The training also underscored how simple safety protocols had a big impact on my ability to go deeper. Without the morning relaxation exercises, without an understanding of how to respond in case of an emergency, without Claudio by my side during my dives, I would have been incapable of diving. The parallels with how we face collapse are worth spelling out: we need safe containers to explore difficult, challenging, and potentially traumatizing territory. These containers are physical, social, and virtual spaces where no one is shamed into any direction, places where we can let go of our guard and understand step-by-step that we are not alone in our feelings.
Habituating ourselves to the high pressures and pains of modernity is a lifelong process. In her book, Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism, Vanessa Machado de Oliveira invites her readers to relate to modernity as if it were a living being, and invites readers to imagine what this being looks, smells, sounds, tastes, and feels like: “Form an educational relationship with modernity so that it can keep teaching you and being taught by you in whatever shape it takes.”
Because our natural tendency is to avoid aspects of reality that bother us, the decision to open up our sensations to the world at large is difficult. But they are unavoidable, like the law of gravity and like the pressure of water at depth. Modernity and collapse are predicaments that we learn to live with and engage. They are real, living forces that must be felt in our bodies.
What we want to avoid is fixing the problem before really understanding it, offering simple narratives and quick-fixes. Some narratives are complex and contradictory, and some problems don’t have easy solutions. The world has no obligation to fit into our human categories. Predicaments like ours are not solved: they are cared for and listened to. The unexpected gift of freediving, for me, was to enter an uncanny place where tension and relaxation, comfort and discomfort, surrender and resilience, coexisted.
In her book, Dread Generation, the ecopsychologist Britt Wray emphasizes how often we forget the emotional aspect of the climate crisis, and why we need to give voice to more challenging emotions such as grief, shame, and anxiety: “As emotions get bulldozed by world events and scientific predictions, the ability to create a more just and healthy world depends largely on how these difficult feelings are tended to.” Listening attentively to what we feel is the foundation of real action. To develop resilience in the face of pressures that aren’t going away, requires a capacity to feel those pressures. It’s counterintuitive, but simple: you cannot change what you cannot feel. This is also why we can’t really tell others what they should do in response to collapse. Before acting in the world, each of us needs to feel within ourselves, hopefully with the companionship of the communities and the more-than-human world.
If it sounds harsh to place the responsibility on the individual to better understand their feelings, consider that “our” feelings are interconnected with the contexts in which we exist. Human beings, with our sensorial bodies, are always in direct connection with that world. We don’t just sense obvious events like sunsets, storms, droughts, and hurricanes. We also sense the slower, subtle processes, like a blossoming relationship, the change in the seasons, as well as increasing pollution in the air and toxicity of our political and media environments. We can also feel in our bodies modernity’s obsession with consumption that pushes us to achieve more and more, turning us into what Gabor Mate calls “hungry ghosts.” Humans -we need to remind ourselves over and over again - have evolved in relationship to the planet. We have always been porous to our surroundings, part of the Earth’s breathing skin. Despite billionaires looking into space and dreaming up lunar metropolises, there is no escape from the Gaian fabric we are woven in.
The ecophilosopher David Abram is one of the most eloquent writers on humanity’s deep embeddedness into the living, breathing fabric of the planet. “Humans,” he says, “are tuned for relationship. The eyes, the skin, the tongue, ears, and nostrils—all are gates where our body receives the nourishment of otherness.” Modernity, however, is predicated on understanding humans as separate from nature, as a category apart. This is why resilience is generally understood as shoring up our defenses, developing thicker skin, rather than opening ourselves to the world.
If we are to really feel into the depth of our planetary predicament, then a first step is to acknowledge that, like divers, we are totally immersed in the Earth; not on it, but within it and part of it. Our bodies can sense all that the Earth holds: both what we enjoy - fresh air, clean water, joy, wonder - and what we don’t enjoy - the pollution, the anxiety, ecocide, and the fear.
Our inability or unwillingness to fully feel and acknowledge our embeddedness and imbrication in a wild, volatile world lies at the heart of the polycrisis. The philosopher Charles Eisenstein speaks about the “story of separation” at the heart of modernity. In this story, the world is composed of separate parts: there is me, and there is you, and there are things out in nature. Humans and their minds are distinct from nature. What this story doesn’t recognize is what spiritual traditions, including the mystical branches of the major monotheistic religions, have proclaimed for thousands of years, namely that the “parts” of this world are all fundamentally interdependent.
If freediving provides a potent metaphor for how to feel our predicament, it’s in large part because modernity and collapse, like water, are fields we are fully immersed in. They are currents we float on. Hence the importance of learning how to navigate them.
We have no choice in fact. Despite Western civilization’s conviction that humanity exists separate from the world, we know we are part of the living Earth. We also are complicit, to varying extents, in reproducing and perpetuating our great crises and deepening the consequences. It’s easy to externalize our problems as a form of chaos in the world “out there” because that’s how the climate crisis and our economic/political crises are generally communicated. Yes, they are definitely out there, but they also inhabit us; we are porous to them.
In mythologies and sacred texts of the world, bodies of water are repositories of a deeper, older, wilder reality. Across all continents, we find myths and stories of primordial bodies of water from which the world originates, as well as floods sent on land as divine retribution or purification. The Christian Bible itself starts with an image of a divine wind sweeping over the face of dark waters. Both the Bible and the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh featured stories of a protagonist who rides out a cosmic flood with his family and animals until coming to rest on a solitary mountaintop. At times, the water can heal and initiate, a process evidenced in the Christian rite of baptism. And at other times, the water kills.
It may be in our sleep that the symbolic potency of water is most apparent. When dreaming, large bodies of water such as oceans, lakes, and pools, frequently represent the unconscious, that part of reality that exists but that we are not aware of on a day to day level. The reason why water plays this role is simply rooted in how we physically experience it. The ocean is vast, impossible to fully grasp and understand; it is mysterious because we cannot see well into it. We travel on its surface, not in its depths. Water bodies are alien to us because we cannot breathe in them.
At the same time, our bodies are made of water and we evolved from the ocean. Our blood is over 85% water, with the same salinity levels as the ocean. The need for water is the great common denominator amongst all forms of life, which is why astronomers looking for life in space end up searching primarily for water. The ocean, and specifically photosynthetic algae in the ocean, produce over 70% of the oxygen in our atmosphere. Water may appear be foreign territory to us, but we are nothing without it.
Diving into water and exploring its depths - physically by diving or metaphorically in our dreams - immerses us into the wider landscape of life; it connects us with what we love and cherish - with sunflight flowing into cenotes, with lush tropical forests, the beauty and intelligence of flora and fauna, and the queerness of fungi. But it also connects with the ugly that we so easily push away: forests covered in concrete, species rendered extinct, and the rich cosmovisions replaced by strip malls and resorts. Modernity hides away this darkness, pushes it out of sight. Through the dopamine hits of consumer culture and social media, through technocratic fixes, it prefers the positive, luminous narrative of progress and success.
But all light creates shadow. To embrace the murkiness of collapse is not an easy dive. The ocean is vast, with dangerous and deep currents. As Britt Wray says, “...the torment comes bearing gifts. If you explore its depths, you’ll find a valve somewhere inside you that taps into the most existential part of yourself.” Diving into these waters is intimidating at first. We have to take it slowly, habituating ourselves to increasingly widening circles of awareness and understanding. We have, in other words, to learn to swim again, to feel the Earth again. Our bodies start numb and stiff, and the pressure feels suffocating. And then, little by little, we stop fighting it. We surrender, stretch our arms, and propel forward.