Finders, Seekers

lost and found #37

by Jeneen R. Garcia

to be published on 20 October 2007

(with new column pic at left ;)

 

 

 

It has been a year and five months since I left the routine of office work for a different way of living. And how different my life is now!

 

Two days of the week, I am in class, either teaching or being taught. Four days of the week, I am in the laboratory searching for tiny corals--one millimeter in diameter, sometimes smaller--that have settled on my experimental terracotta tiles. I fight my way through a jungle of filamentous algae, bryozoans, barnacles, sponges, and other encrusting marine critters, hoping to find the slightest sign of coralline growth.

 

Hour by hour, I run my thumb and forefinger along the surfaces of each tile as if it were the lip of a cherished lover, feeling intently for a certain fine sharpness that can only be the delicate skeletal structure of a baby coral. Now I can tell, from the look of the jungle-like growth on the tile alone, if I am likely to find one coral or many, and if there will be none.

 

I have examined almost 500 tiles since the middle of the semester. But instead of making my vision poor from strain, it has only trained my eyes to be keener underwater. Where before I saw only rock and rubble, now I see a Pocillopora, two weeks old, beginning to claim its place in the world. Today it is barely a millimeter wide, but in a year it will start to branch out and provide shelter to seastar, crab, fish--a visiting turtle, perhaps.

 

When one knows what one seeks, it does not take long to find. Exploring a sandy area with a group of veteran divers, I had not been down five minutes before they spotted a rarely-seen ghost pipefish with its young. It was suspended beside a fern-like crinoid that it was using to camouflage itself. A minute later the group was rushing towards a pair of dragon sea moths that someone had spotted partly buried. On and on it went throughout our three dives, one discovery following another.

 

A boring underwater landscape with practically no corals was transformed, in my eyes, into a treasure trove of fascinating creatures I had never yet seen. I began to look in places I normally ignored. It was not long before I, too, could spot a brown flounder gliding discreetly over the sand, or a baby cuttlefish that had turned green to match the algae it was hiding behind.

 

Sometimes, finding is a matter of studying the habits of what is sought. Then we learn precisely where and when to look. The mandarinfish, for example, emerges just after sunset in geisha-like splendor, magnificent orange and green, then hides again as darkness descends.

 

Other times, it is that split-second glimpse out of the corner of one’s eye--a quick movement, an unguarded gesture--that reveals there may be more to the scene than what is seen. A closer look, and we discover intricate beauty hidden in plain sight.

 

And then there are those we do not seek, and yet find. Such as the bittersweet delight of looking everywhere for something urgent, and finding instead a precious thing we have forgotten or thought had lost elsewhere, long ago, irretrievable.

 

For me, it was looking for terracotta tiles underneath the Sulu Sea last summer and, after a tiring week’s work, finding a red moon rising from the stillness of the sea at the edge of the archipelago. It was seeking solitude to grasp the meaning of a friend’s death, only to find the friendship of unexpectedly beautiful souls who now give deeper meaning to my life.

 

In all my seeking and finding, I have learned this one thing: to find, whether or not we seek, we must first learn how to see. May our eyes stay sharp then, that we may not go through this world blind, searching in vain our whole lives for what is all along right before us.

 

For Sheila and Vince, especially, who taught me to see in Dumaguete

And for all of Ana’s beloved who have welcomed me as their own--you know who you are