bluecnidaria

I studied fish. Not those charismatic mega fauna better known as whales. Everyone wants to be a marine biologist and swim with the whales. I never studied whales. I studied fish, weightless in a three-dimensional world. A beautiful biodiversity, each with a niche carved out perfectly in time and space, their bounty made scarce in man’s ever increasing technology and the gaping maw of humankind. I spent my whole life listening to the tides, the wind, the water, and halyard clanking against wooden masts. And in that time I never really liked the out of doors, instead I drew pictures and painted and I collected fruit stickers, those little things that painstakingly get put on ever piece of fruit, and then have to be peeled off again so you don’t choke on them. I would put them in my sketch book, like a colourful flat plastic fruit salad. But somehow the further I got from my aquatic beginnings, the deeper entrenched into the scholastic world of paper, and ink stains, desks and computer screens.... the more the earth called to me and I ended up studying fish, living in field camps, loving the out of doors and getting really wet and muddy chasing fish.

“But remember always, as I told you at first, that this is all a fairy tale, and only fun and pretense; and, therefore, you are not to believe a word of it, even if it is true. “
- Charles Kingsley (Water Babies)