Invitation

Come in, come in. The water’s fine! You can’t get lost here. Even if you want to hide behind a clutch of spiny oysters — I’ll find you. If you ever leave me at night, by boat, you’ll see the arrangement of red-gold sun stars in a sea of milk. And though it’s tempting to visit them — stay. I’ve been trained to gaze up all my life, no matter the rumble on earth, but I learned it’s okay to glance down into the sea. So many lessons bubble up if you know where to look. Clouds of plankton churning in open whale mouths might send you east and chewy urchins will slide you west. Squid know how to be rich when you have ten empty arms. Can you believe there are humans who don’t value the feel of a good bite and embrace at least once a day? Underneath you, narwhals spin upside down while their singular tooth needles you like a compass pointed towards home. If you dive deep enough where imperial volutes and hatchetfish swim, you will find all the colors humans have not yet named, and wide caves of black coral and clamshell. A giant squid finally let itself be captured in a photograph, and the paper nautilus ripple-flashes scarlet and two kinds of violet when it silvers you near. Who knows what will happen next? And if you still want to look up, I hope you see the dark sky as oceanic — boundless, limitless — like all the shades of blue in a glacier. Listen how this planet spins with so much fin, wing, and fur.