#sailing

The Beauty that Overcomes and the Light that Prevails

Two weekends ago, before we woke up to news this week of the country having engaged in another senseless war, I moved to the edge of the stern of a well-worn open-deck crew boat and stepped into Caribbean blue ocean at Little Saint James, US Virgin Islands. My partner and I had finally taken our dream honeymoon eight years late, though he chose to stay ashore to rest from the prior week, which we spent sailing around the British Virgin Islands.

Right before we moored to a buoy on the southeast corner of Little Saint James, our captain had jolted me with another name for it: Epstein Island.

I wasn’t sure what shaped his choice to go there. Maybe it was a crowded day for water tours, and the island was certain to be less active. But in the weeks leading up to this pivotal moment, I had abandoned news and social media to escape the 24-hour cycle of the horrors represented by this place.

Yet here I was, plopped by circumstance, heading directly for it.

As I swam away from the vessel toward the rugged, sandy shore, I mentally recited all the prayers and meditations I knew by heart—not because I felt unsafe or afraid—but because the task at hand seemed to be to conjure and aim all the light I could at the island.

Once I neared the reefs, I turned my head downward. My breath remained even through my bright green, plastic tube as I snorkeled solo up the coast while the other five snorkelers headed oppositely around the island’s tip. The 12 or so scuba divers had already disappeared beneath the boat’s hull.

My eyes and ears began to adjust to the world beneath the surface of the water: mosaic tints, tones, and shades of aqua and a soundscape of crunching and cracking from fish and crustaceans pecking, digging, and nosing about for food. Yet, I couldn’t help imagining the unfathomable grief endured by the young, sweet souls who had been lured and so grimly abused on the land above.

At first, I noticed nothing but a few scattered sea fans, giant rocks, and coral fragments. But as I continued, I noticed more and relaxed. And the more I stilled myself, the more life came into focus. A natural rhythm was playing out around me, transforming my prayers into awe. I found living geologies that were here long before human atrocity took its first ugly form and will be here, still recording time, long after we’re gone. As I floated above this underwater scene teeming with life, strong yet delicate, I saw vibrant constellations of sea creatures: urchins of every color and size; a curious young barracuda and a light beige porcupinefish, affectionately known as a blowfish, following me for a time; bright, feisty angelfish darting and chasing other fish; cobalt tangs zig zagging sometimes sideways through stony coral; yellowtail damselfish watching over their dark navy juveniles bejeweled with glowing neon dots; red fish and parrot fish with radiant scales digging and scraping the corals; bright teal black-and-white striped wrasse hovering over rocks; flounder gliding across the ocean floor, seamlessly blending with their surroundings. I even spotted a wary queen angelfish poised between two large chunks of coral.

The corals themselves seemed to radiate with color and movement. Thin reddish brown sea fans waved elegantly among firmly planted large elkhorn corals, bright yellow brain corals—both large and small, and different colors and sizes of barrel sponges and giant tube sponges. Warm, wide rays of sun shone through the clear, salty water, creating little iridescent shimmers against multitudes of round, translucent baby jellies and tiny silver fish that schooled near the surface. I thought of my lovely daughter and understood why she chose to live beside the Pacific and wished I could share this with her in real time.

After about an hour, despite my shivers and deeply pruned fingers, I slowly returned to where the divers reemerged one-by-one, their faces expressionless as they gazed back at the sea from the deck. As I reluctantly neared, the last scuba instructor gripped the rails of the ladder and hiked her petite frame and the two large tanks strapped to her back onto the boat. I turned toward the island, pressed my mask into the sea, and let my body float for a last glance. Maybe 10 feet away, a loose array gathered of 50 or 60 black-and-white striped angelfish with brushstrokes of yellow. They moved like musical notes in jazz improv—committed but distinctly unpatterned.

As we sped by the short cresting waves on the return to the dock at Saint John, I reflected on how we, unknowingly and gradually, come to recognize beauty and ugliness as separate and exclusive of one another. But in reality, this is not so. The sanctity of life can be brilliantly magnified in the shallows of evil, as I witnessed that day. Beauty can occur amid terrible darkness, and love can shine where wars rage—especially within us. Battle scars in others can help us recognize we are never alone with our own wounds. Multiple worlds woven with the same threads of time can overlap and loop, and still yet, light will overcome.

Centuries before Epstein was conceived in an ill-fated womb, eras before colonial explorers for sport plundered, raped, and pillaged the Caribbean's indigenous and their land, and even eons before early humans learned how to control sparks caused by friction, natural beauty was expressing itself through form just as vividly as it did that day. And throughout every spin and orbit of the planet since.

This is the spirit that keeps us striving when we’d rather look away, inspires the same art that captures hearts and minds over and over, and brings human experience into balance with nature rather than at odds with it. It’s this spirit that paints sunrises and sunsets across the expanses on the good days and on the bad ones.

Whether we look for it or not, whether we find it or not, micro or macro, beauty thrives. It cannot be squelched by the evils of this world. And in the darkness is where it burns the brightest.

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