Autobiography: Oceans and Dreams

When's it my turn?
Wouldn't I love, love to explore that world up above?
Out of the sea,
Wish I could be,
Part of that world

--The Little Mermaid

 I’d sing along, my young self draped over the coffee table in front of the TV with a huge smile on my face, I was a mermaid. I even asked the shopping mall Santa to make me into a mermaid that year, my heart filled with mild disappointment when I awoke to a Little Mermaid toy doll under the tree instead of real life fins on my feet. I didn’t recognize until recently the irony in this wish, how I so badly wanted to become a mermaid and escape to the sea while I sang along to a tale about leaving the ocean to become human. Ironic, even, that this mermaid became human in order to commit to a lover, while I wanted to become a mermaid to find freedom and independence.

Yet, my mom sometimes recounts a story of a very young Simona experiencing the ocean for the first time. I put my hand into the sand, looked at the grains stuck to my skin, stared at the waves, turned my eyes to my mom’s face, and began to cry. Sand was a foreign substance, and the ocean was as threatening as the unexplored depths it guards. This fear of the sea as a young child compared to my love for the underwater world found in films is a confusing contradiction. What impacted me more, the fantasy or the reality?

Sobel argues each child needs a “ditch” in order to connect with the environment. So what was my ditch? The imaginative reenactment of myself as a mermaid, an intangible (dare I say fake) interaction with a created imaginary world that inspired feelings of joy? Or the tangible (dare I say real) interaction with the sandy beach and waves that prompted feelings of fear? How was it that I so nervously approached the ocean in person, but so lightheartedly approached the ocean in my mind?

The answers to these questions are probably interwoven in the situational differences. I was scared of that sand when I was very young, too young to remember. But with a couple more years on my shoulders, I could easily swim through the local swimming pool, and had been exposed to the ocean environment through a couple of trips to Mexico with all the women of my family and occasional trips to Maine’s seashore. I was already less afraid and maybe even excited by the sea, setting up a perfect scenario for me to become hooked on the romanticized version of the ocean as seen and experienced in The Little Mermaid. But my earlier questions could apply here too: was my “ditch” the ocean as experienced two weeks per year in Mexico and Maine, or was it the year-round watching, humming, acting-out experience of my mermaid fantasy? Was one truly more real?

While experiencing the ocean from the safety of a living room TV screen may not have been environmentally real, the feelings, dreams, and excitement that directly stemmed from the film were certainly real to my childhood self. Daloz posits “conscious focus on vocation” as one of his seven key factors that form “interdependent consciousness,” what he considers to be an ecological interconnectedness between body, self, and the environment. My childhood mermaid fantasy may have been my conscious focus on vocation while living in a city-world where I didn’t have regular access to nature. To an outsider, it may have seemed like a silly meaningless interest in a movie, but in retrospect, I’d argue that it provided the framework for interconnected dreams of self and nature. In this way, it was my most important, meaningful, and accessible ditch.

But as described of the childhood ditch, “These are places of initiation, where the borders between ourselves and other creatures break down, where the earth gets under our nails and a sense of place gets under our skin” (Sobel/Pyle 1993). I am convinced that my interaction with nature-depicting films influenced my childhood self. However, I also feel strongly that having tangible in-person experiences with nature builds environmental consciousness and a sense of place that perfectly clean fingernails just can’t inspire. Relying solely on The Little Mermaid as my connection to nature would not have set up a sturdy enough framework to initiate my current immersive interactions with nature and passion for the ocean. My childhood self needed the opportunity to stand alone in front of the expansive ocean, waves pulling me forward while simultaneously knocking me over. My childhood self needed the opportunity for transcendental experiences while faced with the overwhelming power of the sea juxtaposed with the calming sounds of its motion.

And I had these opportunities each year in both Mexico and Maine. I don’t remember any particular transcendental moment as a young child, but I do remember feeling connected to and inspired by the ocean by the time I was in my early teens. Throughout my growth from the young child afraid of the sand to an ocean-loving teenager, I was able to (partially) overcome my fear of the unknown and the powerful. I welcomed the sand under my fingernails, and let the salt air get under my skin to build a sense of place. And this experience was my second ditch.

Considering how involved I am with the ocean now after having done a SEA Semester and being a diver (the ultimate experience of interconnection and letting go of fears culminating in a cage-free shark dive), these ditches must have impacted me. I don’t believe either was more important than the other, or that I would have been influenced to the same degree with just one of those ditches. A third ditch that I stumbled into later on in life was oceanography and environmental science, knowledge keeping me not only engaged but also reminding me that the ocean could lead me to a career. A ditch that reminded me not to dismiss my childhood dreams, but to follow them. I still dream of floating underwater, surrounded by green-blue salt water, looking upwards from my calm hideaway below the sea towards the waves crashing above my head. Those waves look different from underwater.