Under the waves and over the blues.

Feeling a lot frazzled, a little fed up and fairly weighed down at the end of a particularly trying week, there is one sure-fire way I can fall back on for getting that Friday feeling going.  Thoughts of slipping under the waves and letting it all go for an hour of tranquility with the fish.  I’ve not got any dive time scheduled for the next few weeks, so I’ve been looking at my photos again.  Not as good as the real thing, but taking me to my aquatic cloud nine in spirit at least!

From birth, man carries the weight of gravity on his shoulders.  He is bolted to earth.  But man has only to sink beneath the surface and he is free.

(Jacques Yves Cousteau).

I love these two photos from our pre-baby Thailand dive boat trip, enough to share them as a rare secondary take on photographic ‘dialogue‘ for the weekly WordPress challenge. We had three dive-packed days cruising around the Similan National Park waters of the Andaman Sea, off the west coast of Thailand.  The rock formations in the area are beautiful, the large granite boulders rising up out of the seas looking quite beautiful in their majesty.  Even the legendary scientist and scuba diver, Jacques Yves Cousteau, was entranced when he dived there.

Under the surface the rocky scenery takes on an even more impressive presence.  Koh Bon is one of the outlying islands in the group and it is known as a potential hot spot for shark and manta ray encounters.  We’ve been fortunate to see sharks and rays in our dive travels, but like most divers, we’re always up for more.  We dived at Koh Bon three times, and each time we were feeling hopeful as we flipped off the back of the boat. Each time our hopes were sadly misplaced and we came up exhilarated by the dives but without that coveted manta-ray moment.

Despite the shy marine life, the dives were stunning, if for scenery alone.  The towering rock formations rise up to the surface, covered in corals and plant growth, waving in the ripping currents that wash over them.  We’d finned furiously into the current to get to them, and then hovered in the sheltered lee of the rock, quietly enjoying the goings on and waiting to see if anything big would turn up with the current.

Some divers would have considered the no-show dives a waste.  I try to take a more relaxed view about it, although I confess I sometimes feel a slight twinge of disappointment.  Like that Maldivian dive where we could hear the clicks and whistles frustratingly close but not actually see the pod of dolphins just that bit too far off in the blue. Or the morning we dived off the Scottish East coast with no seals in sight, only to find out afterwards that other divers in the water had been playing with them as the seals tugged on their dive fins!  Being a scuba diver you have to come to terms with the fact that sometimes the luck just isn’t with you!

Besides, I can remember hovering there in the warm, sheltered curve of the rock, watching these Moorish Idol fish and feeling incredibly at peace and privileged.  They were fluttering around like marine butterflies against the backdrop of the cathedral-like rock formations in the sunlit upper reaches of the water column.  If that’s a ‘miss’ I’ll take it.

The sea, once it casts its spell, holds one in its net of wonder forever.

(Jacque Yves Cousteau).

 

When is a laundry basket not a laundry basket?

When is a laundry basket not a laundry basket?  When it’s a ball-pit of course!

With babies and children, one picture seldom tells the whole story.  Some of my favourite photos are part of a split-second sequence. Or they show a developing story over months and years.  So I love this week’s ‘dialogue‘ WordPress weekly photo challenge for the opportunity to convey the dialogue between two pictures.

Recently our little girl has had a real interest in everyday household objects.  Car keys, saucepans, mummy’s ‘big girl’ hair brushes. But the clear favourite is the laundry basket. Turn it upside down and climb over it, put your dolly on top and push it, Sit in it and get daddy to pull you along in your own personal ‘sleigh’.  The possibilities are endless.

These are two of my favourites – there were many other laundry basket possibilities!  With a child in the house there is always a pile of laundry, so the basket is always about somewhere!

Maya Angelou once said ‘you can’t use up creativity.  The more you use, the more you have‘. I am learning that the enormity of childhood creativity is a wonderful, beautiful thing.  I wish us adults could hold on to it a little better.  At the very least, I hope our daughter holds on to hers for a long, long time to come.

Hands up – I confess I am a bit of a Pinterest procrastinator! So when there’s something important to be done you can usually find me looking at pinned quotes or considering the feasibility of some overly ambitious Pinterest inspired home projects.  Here’s a sentimental little quote I came across earlier in the week.  I thought it seemed particularly apt:

‘Today I will be thankful for all the little socks and the grass stained jeans and the endless piles of laundry.  For there will come a day when the laundry basket is empty and these days will be profoundly missed’.

That day will come, of course.  But even when the laundry basket is just a (rather empty) laundry basket once more, the memory of ball-pits, sleighs, and baby obstacle courses will remain.