Surprises

Roatan was wonderful as always, beautiful beaches, beautiful coral reefs, and a wonderful surprise.  Actually I had stumbled upon hints of it before I was supposed to, but my beautiful wife joined me there for three days in paradise!  It was grand!

But that wasn't the only surprise.  We hired a boat that took us out to a reef we had not seen before, and a cut in the reef called the "Spooky Cut."  As you approach the bottom is about 30 ft. down, covered in sand, and the coral rises before you like a giant underground beachhead.  In the center is this crack that at its narrowest is only about 10 ft. wide, but probably drops 120 feet to a narrow floor covered in chunks of broken-off coral the size of a large pick-up truck.  You can only see the ones that got caught above 60 ft or so because the darkness of the cut and the intervening water make the depths a dark, foreboding no-man's-land.

I found myself asking myself why it was so spooky to me personally.  I recalled a dream many years ago in which I dove under the floorboards of my house into the ocean below.  The floor of the ocean in the front half of the house sloped gently away from the shore to about 50 ft.  Pretty shells washed to and fro on the sand.  Half-way back from the front of the house the land dropped away vertically...yes, you guessed it, into a spooky black depths in which there were scary things that might embarrass me horribly if they ever came to light.  There was more to the dream, but it felt eirily as if I was staring back into my dream as I gazed down into the blackness of the "Spooky Cut."

So what do I do with it?  I do not have the technical skill to go down into the cut safely to face my fears, so to speak, and I had the distinct insight that such would not have worked anyway.  In the intervening years since that dream in many ways I have plumbed the depths of the darkness.  I know what there is there that can embarrass me, but more importantly, I have discovered riches hidden away until their appointed time of discovery, capacities I did not know I had, gifts to give far more significant than the pretty shells of my then-conscious soul.

The "Spooky Cut" was still spooky, but now in a fun sort of way, as it recalled what I have found in my own depths.