Unfolding Wonder

I started to see pretty extraordinary things.
– Craig Foster, My Octopus Teacher

Something otherworldly happened last week. We took a family trip to Hawaii, my husband’s favorite place on earth. I prefer colder climes, but had promised the kids I’d go snorkeling with them, so a few days in I took off my glasses and went in the water. Turns out snorkeling with 20/400 vision is a disaster—I could only see high-contrast stripey fish and only if they were within arm’s distance. Our ten-year-old, sporting no gear save cap and goggles yet tunneling through the water like an otter, kept asking me, “mom, can you see?” She stayed near me like a guide dog for the blind.

The second time, I dug up some old contacts I had brought along and tried again in the same spot. Lo and behold, it was amazing! Every kind of fish you could imagine swarmed about in every size and shape and color of the rainbow. Where did they all come from? “Oh, they were all there yesterday; didn’t you know?” our oldest replied.

I went in again our last morning. We were at a different beach with fewer fish, so the younger three opted to play in the sand. Our oldest quickly swam off with my husband in search of larger coral formations, but I lingered in the shallows, enjoying the way the sunlight fell in rippling grids upon the endless stretch of sand below. So geometrically perfect and untouched, I thought, gazing at the ridges of sand. Floating there, I might as well have been alone on another planet.

I began following a few silver fish towards the rocks. One of them kept nibbling at a small rock, and for a split second I saw something move just next to it. It looked like a spotted eel that must have retracted back into some recess, so I floated there as still as I could with my eyes glued to that spot, hoping to glimpse it again. After a few minutes, that entire section of rock detached and I realized I had been staring at a perfectly camouflaged octopus; what I had mistaken for an eel was in fact one of its arms.

I immediately surfaced, thinking to wave the others over, but they were too far out of view. If I swam back to shore to get the younger kids I felt sure I would lose the octopus entirely. No way to take a photo either. This will just have to be for me, I thought, and looked back down. The octopus was roaming the rock with the silver fish never far behind, the two of them forming an odd pair. The octopus occasionally extended an arm to flick the fish, whereupon the fish would dart away, then back. They’re playing, I realized.

I must have floated there for nearly an hour. The octopus glided, crawled, jetted through the water. It turned white or dark red or speckled brown, in one instant matching the color and texture of its surroundings so well that it virtually disappeared in plain sight. There was no way I would ever have spotted it in the first place had the fish not led me to it.

Floating there, I thought of all my many concerns. All the things circling the drain of my mind, the things I’m constantly carrying or working through. All that is real, surely, and yet here in this place, deep down and away, was life beyond it all. There are marvelous things that exist in places no one sees, that live just to live, that play just to play, and for that hour I remained suspended in wonder. Which is the truer reality: the self-concerned world I so often inhabit, or this other one? What other wonders do I pass through without seeing?

We flew home, and a few days later I found myself suspended in much the same fashion—body prone, head down, arms out—only this time inside a giant magnet. Wonders on a different scale, I thought, picturing the protons in my body aligning and relaxing. It wasn’t much fun though, lying mostly naked in the dark tunnel of an MRI machine, trying not to startle as gunshot-loud clicks and noises erupted at unpredictable frequencies and intervals. I focused on my breathing and tried to picture myself back in the water.

The MRI showed a new lesion in my remaining breast—low likelihood to be cancer, but requiring an MRI-guided biopsy, so it’s back in the machine in a few weeks. I hadn’t felt much “scanxiety,” perhaps because it was hard to believe anything could be growing while I was getting infusions, but there you go: probably nothing, maybe something. This is the price I pay for not prophylactically removing my non-cancerous breast, though I can’t bring myself to regret that decision.

Meanwhile, this current phase of treatment is snowballing to an end: I had my second-to-last infusion today. The port comes out in two days. My cardiologist said I could stop taking heart meds. This isn’t really the end-end (is there ever an end-end?), but the euphoria of reaching a time when I can go a month without being stuck by a needle feels like enough to power me straight through to the new year.