http://polaroid41.com/depths/
Monday, May 31st, 2021, 10:57am.
With space exploration, scientists can see everything that's in front of them, using telescopes. With ocean exploration, we can't see very far. Light doesn't permeate deep into open water and the pressure is extraordinary. In fact, it's easier to send a person to space than it is to send one down to the bottom of the deepest part of the ocean.
There’s a powerful metaphor there: it’s hard for humans to go deep.
When we got married in 2012, we’d already bought an apartment and had been living together for seven years, so we didn’t really need the traditional housewares type of wedding gifts. Instead, our family and friends treated us to a honeymoon in the Maldives.  A destination wildly more luxurious than anything we were used to, a once-in-a-lifetime type of trip.  We booked ten days on the tiny island of Kandolhu, no bigger than a football field.  We chose Kandolhu because we wanted something extremely calm, and with just a dozen or so little bungalows, it looked perfect. In the days leading up to it though, I started to get nervous. What if I didn’t like it? It was a tiny island in the middle of nowhere, there was literally nothing there except the bungalows, the dining area and a little two-person spa. You couldn’t even see any other islands on the horizon. To arrive, we had to take a six-person seaplane to a different island and then a little boat brought us over to Kandolhu. The little boat would only come back ten days later to pick us up. It was exactly what we wanted...but suddenly I was feeling a little claustrophobic.
We arrived and it was even more gorgeous than we expected. The sand was so purely white, it wasn’t even hot underfoot, the vegetation was a riot of green, the water was a warm and dazzling array of blue and turquoise. Paradise.  The island was indeed very small: so small we could walk around the entire perimeter in just 5 minutes.
We settled into our bungalow, I got my suit on and grabbed my snorkeling gear. I stood at the water’s edge and looked at the infinite expanse of blue. I waded in...the water temperature was perfect. I put on my mask and dove in and lo and behold, beneath the endless blue, a rainbow of color: fish and coral everywhere, even in the shallow waters.  I floated easily in the salty water and with a few effortless kicks of my fins I found myself over a sudden and dramatic drop off. As I understand it, the Maldives islands are essentially just the tips of extinct prehistoric volcanoes which have sunken into the ocean.  So our tiny island was the tip of the volcano and a few kicks off shore and a look below the surface was like looking down the side of an underwater mountain. I couldn’t fall, because I was floating on the surface of the water, but it was vertiginous. The water was crystal clear and I could see a long, long way down, but I couldn’t see the bottom.
Over the ten days I saw gray sharks, giant sea turtles, fish of every size and color, coral, huge clams and elegant sting rays. The smallness of the island didn’t matter because ten days would never be enough to explore the depths just off the shore.
The surface is beautiful, relaxing even. All that blue. And the depths are scary sometimes (sharks!), but so worth it. It was the perfect honeymoon. And ultimately, isn’t it the perfect metaphor for marriage? For life? For ourselves? If we stay on the surface, it all looks the same. If we go deep, there’s an entire world waiting for us.
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The complete 'polaroid' - text, minicast and polaroid photo - available at: http://polaroid41.com/depths/

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