Last night, I watched the documentary ‘My Octopus Teacher’. What a story… straight from the heart. What We Can Learn from Nature.
I won’t give a review here, please watch it yourself. I would like to share how this beautiful story touched me.
It’s about a man, Craig Foster, who after experiencing severe burnout, decides to dive every day in the Atlantic Ocean near his home on the breathtakingly beautiful coast of South Africa. One day during one of his dives, he has a remarkable encounter with an octopus. A significant and life-changing encounter as it turns out, something he felt even then. An encounter that ultimately lasts the entire yet brief life of the octopus. One year.
As a viewer, I witness something magical..
Craig, with his phenomenal camera skills, takes you into the world below the waterline. A world in itself that you enter. Each day his connection with this extraordinary being grows, there is increasingly more exploration, more trust. What a beautiful sight when the octopus, with utmost caution, first extends one of its tentacles curiously and exploratively toward Craig. As a viewer, I witness something magical… that’s how it feels.
Craig’s perseverance and determination are admirable. Without a suit and oxygen, with only a pair of large flippers, descending every day into that ice-cold sea with its powerful currents. There must have been something primordially strong driving him to do this.
Why Does His Story Touch Us?
I recognize a lot in it. A special encounter with an animal… a being… that teaches you something. And also the loss, the intense emotion that comes with it, and knowing deep inside that it was meaningful. I share that experience with Craig, even though I didn’t do it in the deep sea with flippers.
But there’s more that touches me. Craig tells how his perspective, his way of looking, and ultimately his entire way of ‘being’ transforms by immersing himself so completely in this underwater realm.
Another world slowly opened up. Not immediately. It took time. It required patience. As if Craig first had to cross an invisible boundary, propelled by his unwavering attention, dedication, and curiosity.
Craig began to see ‘everything’ differently than before. His vision grew, became all-encompassing. From the tiniest organism, the mollusks, pajama sharks (that’s their real name), to the grand diversity of aquatic plants and the protection of the kelp forest. The sea with all its inhabitants, large and small, in the depths or shallows. One large, living, millions-of-years-old organism. Nothing exists in isolation, everything depends on each other. From observer, as he calls it himself, I became part of it. Beautiful how he describes that.
Alan Watts expresses it beautifully in one of his many texts; “You have to see that life, the so called conflict of various species with each other is not actually a competition, but a very strange system of interrelationship.”
We Too Are Nature
What if we looked with the same perspective as Craig did in The Octopus Teacher. In a time full of intensity in the world, with increasing polarization, where truly listening to each other is under growing pressure. Where we see what we want to see, or are accustomed to seeing.
What if we really looked at the world around us with that attention and curiosity. Would we then see something different..? Even though we often seem to see it differently, we too are nature. This wisdom that Craig so beautifully reveals to us also lies within us.
