Looking Toward the Light
Topic: Herons of my Soul
Below is an entry in Chicken Soup for the Soul...Entitled "Looking Toward the Light" By David Haldane. Just something to reflect on...
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I hadn't planned on finding myself alone in an underwater cavern beneath the jungle floor near Akumal, Mexico. Truth is, I'd expected to be with my wife. But two weeks before this long-anticipated vacation, she ended our fifteen-year marriage and turned my life upside down.
The trip had been planned for months. Tickets had been purchased. Friends had been told. And, after making careful arrangements for the care of our children, my wife and I eagerly awaited departure.
Then our lives fell apart.
Of course, it had been a long time coming and both of us had seen the signs. Yet when the final breakup occurred, it took me by surprise - the hand of life had seized me by the throat and given me a good shake.
The final scene of our marriage remains etched in my memory as if it happened this morning: me standing in the front yard, already feeling the heavy weight of fear and loss and panic closing in as her car screeched off.
That awful feeling stayed with me in the weeks and months that followed - a certainty in the pit of my stomach that the bottom of my world had dropped out and that nothing would ever be the same.
But in the midst of my depression, I decided to make the Mexico diving trip anyway, believing, I suppose, that the diversion would do me some good. I had been diving since I was sixteen and, over the years, felt as if I'd seen it all. I had glided through the dancing kelp forests off Southern California, spotted the dim vision of a shipwreck in Florida waters, plunged ecstatically into an underwater canyon in the Cayman Islands and encountered a shark in Hawaii.
Something I hadn't experienced, though, was a cenote - one of those dark, mystical ponds in the jungle, the mirage-of-a-swimming-hole that shouldn't be there. I'd heard that some cenotes open into awesomely beautiful underwater caverns, and I intended to see one with my own eyes.
The sense of foreboding was still with me as I stepped off the plane and shuffled, alone, into the airport in Mexico. As divers, we are taught to stay out of the water when in emotional turmoil, that panic is the number-one enemy of survival underwater. Nonetheless, I told myself, the experience would help me leave the past behind and move on to the future.
I turned out to be right, but in ways I never imagined.
It was cold the day I arrived at the cenote in the Yucatan jungle. Our group of divers - none of whom I had met before - was accompanied by a local guide. I remember struggling to pull on my wet suit, shivering with excitement tinged with the subtle anticipation of doom to which I had grown accustomed. Slowly, tentatively, we swam out to the middle of the pool and descended.
At the bottom, thirty feet down, we paused for a moment, gazing at the otherworldly mineral formations on the walls. The first thing that struck me was the quality of the light. It was weird, eerie - somehow ethereal.
In front of us lay a wide cavern. Entering the mouth, we swam toward the back wall, where the cavern narrowed into a small, dark tunnel, snaking deep into the earth. The tunnel entrance was marked by rusty metal signs in Spanish. Peligro, they warned – Danger - and No Pase Adelante - Do Not Proceed.
Legend has it that the ancient Mayans used cenotes to make human sacrifices. Staring at those ominous signs illuminated in the beam of my light, I thought about what might lie in the tunnel beyond. Not that I would find out: None of us in the group were certified cave divers, nor had we brought any lines. Right then and there, sucking hard on my regulator, I decided to keep the cavern exit in sight.
We swam up to the ceiling of the cavern. There, cut into the rock as if honed by some ancient hand, a small indentation thrusted upward. One of the other divers, a young man who'd been here before, stuck his head into the hole and motioned me to follow. I did, and was shocked to find my face above water - a dank air pocket with room for just two heads. Grinning, the man spit out his regulator and looked me in the eye: "Is this cool, or what?"
His voice, bouncing off the pressing walls, was disembodied and muffled, like it was coming from inside a coffin. I pulled out my regulator and responded, "Very cool!"
But the voice was not mine. It was the small, distant sound of a man in a bottle. A man caught in a place he shouldn't be, struggling to control the rising wave of dread that, until now, had been willfully kept at bay.
I stuffed the regulator back in my mouth and slid out of the hole to the bottom of the cavern. Then it happened. My fins must have stirred up the silt on the cenote floor because suddenly I was enveloped in a blinding cloud.
Frantically I tried to keep my bearings, tried to keep the light of the cavern opening in view. But as silt billowed all around me, it became increasingly difficult. For what seemed like an eternity, I peered into nothingness, determined not to move my eyes from the spot where the exit had been. Then, with a sinking feeling, I realized I no longer knew the way out.
Panic. It growled at me, bared its gnarly teeth. Every pore of me wanted to bolt, to escape, to swim frantically in the direction I had last seen the light. The only thing that stopped me was the knowledge that I could just as easily be rushing toward my death in the dark.
They tell you about panic in dive class. Don't give in to it, they say. The solution is simple, really. Stop. Breathe. Think. Act. And so began the voice of reason, more a whimper than a shout.
"Don't move," the voice told me, and I froze. "Think," it said, and I tried to figure my way out. Silt rises and so it also must fall. For what seemed like forever, I hung there, totally alone, with my guts churning. Then, as quickly as the cloud enveloped me, it disappeared, and once again I could see my way clear.
After that, the lesson of that dive - indeed, of all dives - became a mantra for me, a metaphor for what was happening in my life: Stay calm, don't bolt. Keep your eye in the direction of the light, even if you can't see it. Have faith that one day you will see it again.
It's been six years since my wife left me and I encountered darkness in a cenote. During that time I often felt like bolting. I frequently thought I would lose my sanity altogether. But I didn't. As in the cenote, I hung there in silence, staring toward the invisible light. My patience was rewarded with the eventual settling of the silt that was obscuring my vision. It returned slowly to the bottom of the cavern that was my life until, at last, I saw my way clear.
Boy, what a view.
cheeky