Where My Feet Met Fantasy

It was on the second night of our 8 day getaway, it was a dark night, at a time where the moon was at its skinniest, but a thin, silver sickle. However the moon was hidden from view on this night, only gods know why one would still bother mentioning it! I guess it is our primitive appetite for romance that inflames this enchantment with our largest orbiting satellite, ever reliable, one can always count on it to adorn a romanticised anecdote. Nevertheless, the night was dark! The sky displayed our neighbouring planets and stars and galaxies with all the depth and crispness one could hope for. I and my consort in inquisition  danced out of the house we were so privileged to have stayed in along with family and friends, to take a stroll by the seaside. It is her insatiable appetite for life that drove us to spending every last morsel of energy on absorbing the sheer wonder of the night, every night. Among her chief interests is marine life, and so the subject of luminescent plankton came up as we made our way from the house, through the thigh high picked fence gate, and down the road to the beach. She suggested that the slight and hardly discernible hue of blueness in the breaking waves – visible from the deck of our house – might be those phenomenal plankton things, and if not, that she hoped we might encounter such a phenomenon some time, if not tonight. But being the rational thinkers we are, we readily dismissed the likelihood that we would have the fortune of experiencing something as fantastical as only The Life of Pi can inspire, especially since we were still in range of these awfully bright lights illuminating the frequented shore. One wouldn’t want to be the fool who mistook the reflection of a floodlight for a wonder of nature!

As we strolled our way down the beach, further away from the intrusive lights of the surrounding developed areas, we slowly edged toward the water. We were still in conversation when I happened to look down onto the dark, wet sand in front of me… At this point the thought of glowing plankton was still fresh in my mind, and I still played with the thought of such a possibility, seeing my feet kick up the sand we suspected of glowing just moments ago, in my minds eye.

There is something strange about these tiny blobs of oxidising luciferase. It is not the phytoplankton itself I refer to, with its bioluminescence, but our general awareness of it. When one is utterly uninformed regarding a phenomenon, there seems to engage a mechanism of the mind that deals with what I’d call the ‘known unknown’. It is a mechanism that has made us rather susceptible to superstition and irrational fear, and in the same vein made us open to accept that which would seem simply wondrous, supernatural, or impossible, as something real and worthy of our consideration. It is in this elusive affinity for the ethereal that we find some of the more beautiful attributes of unadulterated humanity. In a moment where we engage with a ‘known unknown’ we, in tandem with our circumstance, offer ourselves the opportunity to glimpse human tenacity. This is where we indulge our curiosity and expose the fragile inner being to newness. We are in such a state vulnerable in nearly every conceivable sense, because we allow ourselves to bypass the defensive mechanisms that have been so vital to our survival of evolution! We let go of apprehension and caution, drifting into a sheer state of unreserved awe… And the conscious being that is you utters a wide-eyed “wow!”

It wasn’t so much a moment of surprise or mild disbelief as it was a ready acceptance of Mother Earth’s scintillating treat, when I noticed a distinct greenish glow radiating outward from my feet with every successive step! I stopped and yelled for my dearest strolling partner to look. I yelled something along the lines of “look! It’s happening! It’s real! Look, this is it!” as I almost incessantly stomped on the sand to recreate the effect. Beyond that I cannot recall particularities as my mind went haywire, exhilarated by the novelty of this event. We kicked the sand, sending clusters of sparkles out in front of us. Clusters of discernible individual flashes of light connected by an aquamarine glow that can only be compared to the appearance of the Aurora Borealis. Our behaviour could be described as frantic, wildly ecstatic! We went proverbially bananas over the pleasure at hand, acting like children who hadn’t yet learned the restraint pervading society – containing damn near every part of its sober expression. It was a moment of absolute, unreserved indulgence. As soon as we could tear ourselves away from the miraculously transformed sand we looked out into the surf and beheld strokes of aquamarine glow, flashing and connecting into longer, broader strokes as the waves kept breaking next to each other. The surf rolled out on a relatively large plateau of beach, which meant that we could walk in quite far before getting drenched from head to toe. As our feet moved through the water, and later our legs, it made streaks of aqua glow! With every wave passing, the water ran down our legs sparkling and glowing! It was as though we were in a fantasy world! In a place such as where the tree of souls lives in the film Avatar, and with every motion we looked on with wonder and awe. The enchantment of the moment was truly mind boggling, the kind of thrill you never thought you’d ever be in the position to explain.

Once we made it out of the water I again looked down at the sand responding to my footsteps. Having calmed down a little, a healthy dose of skepticism paired with curiosity – a desire to understand – made its way back into consciousness and I considered the possibility of an exaggerated effect such as ambient light reflecting off of the swelling sand around my feet. As I have a second try at making sense of what I see – since it makes little sense for such individual flashy things to make such a uniform glow around our feet – my mind evaluates the effect and compares it to the manner in which the saturated sand bulges out slightly around one’s feet by day. With every depression of a foot the water is squeezed from the sand, and the way in which it reflects ambient light is altered. However the effect I was witnessing was far more extensive than this! It couldn’t be ambient light now reflecting off the bulged sand, the ambient light is too dim! And my footsteps do not impress that far into its surroundings! It became clear that what I was seeing was exactly as weird as it appeared.

After we drank as much of this alien, nocturnal beauty  as we could handle we made ourselves comfortable on a dune, looking over the water, discussing life, love, spirituality and whatever happened to trouble my dearest consort’s mind. Conversations, vibrant with the glow of bioluminescent inspiration, these are the conversations dreams are made of. We returned to the beach every night after bringing the rest of our family to feast on the pleasure of discovery and fascination, having our fill on Mother Earth’s tranquil thrill. Seeing all these people, from teens to middle age, acting all silly with excitement! I have never seen a moment of such pure childlike, mesmerised excitement. It is something that I will from here on pursue and seek out in every avenue of life. It is like a vital force of the kind only seen in super hero films, an energy that fuels a way of life, a source that gives power to gods.

If I consider the sheer, life altering experience one draws from it, it seems incomprehensible that such a phenomenon hasn’t surfaced in the discussions we share about remarkable encounters! However, it is rather more a sight to be seen than a picture to be taken. A photograph does it no justice, and a paragraph lends it little. With all the sincerity I can muster I implore you to step outside and waltz, and whistle. Go and watch the tumbling, crashing salt water fizzle! Without an infusion of fresh invigoration our perspectives grow weak, and brittle. Grab a friend, embrace a lover, out in the night are new thoughts to discover! Down by the shore lies a new demeanour to be awakened…