We're All Light

"My first memory is of light - the brightness of light - light all around."
~Georgia O'Keeffe

I'm feeling a lot of love lately, flowing through my fingertips and radiating from my eyes, hair, flippers, and everywhere throughout the universe. We're all made of light, really! If you are unsure, read The Rainbow and The Worm, written by Chinese physicist Mae-Wan Ho, who shows us how we are indeed all light.

Emergent Human

"Human nature is internally inconsistent, that our continuities with, and our differences from, the earth's other animals are mysterious and profound; and in these continuities, and these differences, lie both a sense of strangeness on earth and the possible key to a way of feeling at home here."


~Dorothy Dinnerstein, from The Mermaid and the Minotaur.

As far back in time as we have records, mermaids have existed in human consciousness, in all parts of the world. Dorothy Dinnerstein observes that ancient civilizations shared common symbols of their emerging humanity as distinguished from the purely animal realm. One of these shared symbols is the mermaid / merman, a half fish, half human creature inhabiting both realms.

I was born of the ocean from which all animal life originated, and am a part of it still, while swimming and yearning for the shore on which the first humans walked in search of the horizon. As such, my very being lives most fully in the realm of human dreams, a reminder of my origins in the salty seas and my future in the stars.

Caught in the Gyre

William Butler Yeats accurately captured in words and poetic images the force of the deep ocean gyre (see previous post). I am not an especially strong swimmer by mermaid standards, so when I found myself in the cold Arctic waters off the coast of Norway recently in a widening gyre, it took all my strength to escape it.

The only way to escape the pull and fury of a gyre is to swim under it, and that is what I did. I swam almost straight down, several hundred feet at least, until I reached the ocean floor. Looking up through the miasma, I could see the gyre in the shape of an enormous funnel channeling the frigid aquamarine water, a tornado of water taking everything into itself.

Drawing on the power of my mind and ethereal body, I swam down and away from the gyre in a 5 mile semicircular path until I was finally free of it. I had been submerged for more than a day before surfacing again, in the Gulf of Finland's gentler waters. Seeking rest upon a rock, I tended to my skin and scales, injured by stones, shells, and swirling sand. My hair emerged tangled in long strands of green, red and brown seaweed.