Have you ever looked under the lip of the ocean? I hadn’t. But last week in the Virgin Islands, I floated on the surface as the entire back of my body crisped red under the sun. An interloper. I snorkeled three times a day and marveled at the world beneath me. If only I could feel half as acclimated to my environment as these fish and sea creatures seemed to be. With each wave gust, they moved gracefully–never bumping into one another, never losing orientation, assured of place, part of a greater flow. The immediacy of this collective reaction is something I’ve rarely seen on land. These under water inhabitants seemed to have mastered a Taoist bending principle that I hadn’t (and haven’t).

Items to note. Underwater bubbles sound like crackling. Being in the water with a nurse shark is not as scary as I anticipated. Angel fish hide by sliding their flat colorful bodies in between rocks. Trumpet fish skim the surface like a troupe of swords. Barracuda stare right into your eyes. Squid travel in families and line up in perfect formation, like jet fighters. Sea turtles coast along like mellow dudes and dudettes of the ocean. Black spiny sea urchins dance about with their 12-inch long spines. You part through long wide schools of glimmering bait fish, creating an illusion of closeness. Somehow when you swim down deep and look up, bait fish shine like raindrops.

Extract the blue and this landscape is desert-like. A similar starkness punctuated by bright colors–a place of canyons and flats, grays, mustard yellows and deep reds. It is what I imagine the moon to be. I loved being part of two worlds at once. Face down to the peaceful hum of the ocean. Face up to thrashing waves, squawking seagulls and pelicans diving in for bait fish. And then, … the human element.

On land, the ruins of 18th and 19th century sugar mills are striking–towers built with brick and bleached-out brain coral, gardens of trunky Flamboyant trees blooming orange, views of a tropical paradise. At first I ran around delighted by the antiquity that ruins dredge up. Quickly, that excitement morphed into a sagging shoulders type of sadness. The sugar industry thrived here in the Caribbean because of the work of west African slaves… long before the English actually discovered they could make sugar out of the common garden beet. In a landscape so dreamy and open, slaves were trapped in a rhythm of producing a sweetener that traveled by boat to England where some gentleman or lady could spoon it delicately into an afternoon cup of tea. Where’s the bending principle in that?

That story of cause and effect is not a thing of the past, I know. Look at the food on your plate and ask where it came from. We live in a bath of cause and effect. It just so happened that while I was off being useless and communing with four-eyed butterfly fish, Iranian youth turn Twitter into a genius political tool, North Korea threatened to fire a missile at Hawaii, another upstanding politician regaled us with his steamy affair and the one eternal Michael Jackson left us. Somehow the flow of life looks much smoother under water. Or does it?

Last night, as we collapsed into bed, fresh from the plane, I garbled to my boyfriend about whether the sea world understands something that we humans don’t yet. (I know that death and fear exist under water too). He responded in his logical way:

“The two systems are more similar than immediately apparent.”

What do you think?