I just came back from a week in Puerto Rico. The souvenirs I brought home are two black stones from Playa Negra, smooth as marbles in your pocket, and this meditation to take you there:
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Tuck your mask and fins beneath your seat and climb on your motorbike with your soul mate, or ride alone, east from Esperanza for fifteen minutes, or twenty, along the quiet road where hens and their chicks run free and lean wild horses graze along the shoulders. Pick a beach, any beach among the many. For solitude, start with Pata Prieta, the Secret Beach, where the path brings you down to the end of a white crescent that arcs two hundred meters from one outcropping of rocks to the other.
At first you think you’re the only one in on the secret. Drink in the Caribbean turquoise, drink in the breeze, and let the lapping pull you along the arc to the far end. Taste the water with your feet, feel the wet edge where the sand shifts from firm to puddles and back to firm. As you stroll, notice to your right in the indented pockets of mangrove shade that skirt the beach, notice the people noticing you, the nod, the wave, and you splash on and they recede in the shade.
At the far end strip down and gear up and slip into the shallows where the sand ripples reflect the bathwater warmth and the waves working their way to shore. Float first in the shallow water, test the seal on your mask, take in a breath or two, then glide to the outcroppings where the choral live and the water is cooler. Find your rhythm, find your breath, amplified now by your snorkel tube. Pull in and blow out until you believe you can breathe with your mouth under water, until the flow soothes you.
Find your rhythm floating. Find the fish you came to see feeding on the choral and all that grows on these plant-animals. First one yellow tailed snapper with a brilliant stripe along the side that splits into the tail, then another snapper follows, and then they’re both gone. A luminescent blue angel fish glides into view, flickers away, then comes again to linger, followed by another and another. And then you spot the snappers again joining the angels and the bar jacks and the brilliant medicos and now three zebra fish—all oblivious to you above. They’re no bigger than your hand, yet they show no fear of you in your enormity, trying to hide above.
They let you into their silent underworld. You take it as a welcoming. You lose the gravity of your world. Sounds recede and time drifts and choral fans dance in unison to the rhythms of the sea. All the grasses and flora of the ocean floor dance in unison to the rhythms of the sea, an undulation that deserves a symphony. The idle fish rise and fall with the swayings of the ocean, and soon you notice that you’re rising and falling with them, and you notice that your breathing has fallen in step with the risings and fallings, drawing your air in and letting it slowly go, so that you’re breathing with the ocean and floating as the fishes float and dancing with the choral fans.
As you float above this universe, you see suddenly that you’ve been looking at choral rocks that house in their cavities black sea urchins lurking, small porcupines of the sea, smaller than your fist. Before, your mistook them for shadows. And then you see that you also missed the bigger ones, some the size of cantaloupes, lurking always, daring to be touched, a sharp note in this otherwise graceful underworld.
Then into your field glides the spotted eagle ray, the largest creature to come your way, its fins flapping like wings. Is the wingspan as long as your arm? It’s hard to tell, but easy to feel the grace of this bird fish as it circles around you. Your arms try to match the rhythm of its fins. Follow the spotted eagle ray if you can, but it will mock your speed and you will let it go.
Return to the beach and then to your bike, but come again into this underworld, and again, and again. Find your grounding in the weightless water life, find the sea creatures we once were. Find your soul. Follow the fish and let them go. Follow your soul mate and don’t let her go. When you return to land, you may find that ocean motion still in you, a metronome for your land life. Keep a smooth black stone in your pocket to bring you back, again, and again.