Editor’s letter: Introduction to the Innerview

I keep in mind the sunshine. And the sensation. I can nonetheless really feel it now, greater than 20 years on.

Off a small island within the Bay Islands, I slipped beneath the waterline for the primary time. I had been informed what to anticipate: the feeling of weightlessness, the hues of blue that don’t exist on land, the marine life. What no one informed me was what the expertise – and the various hundreds of revisits since – would do to me. What it could quietly, completely rearrange.

As the floor receded – that brilliant, shimmering ceiling shifting additional away – one thing shifted. Something I couldn’t title. I felt an consciousness I had by no means skilled earlier than. I used to be fully current. I noticed our planet and my place inside it – really – for the primary time.

Until that day, I had been residing a half-life. The expertise wasn’t spiritual, precisely, although it had the feel of one thing transcendent. It wasn’t merely the fantastic thing about what I used to be seeing, although the wonder was actual. It was one thing about relation – about being reminded, at a mobile degree, that I used to be not separate from this. That I got here from this. That it runs via me whether or not I’m within the water or not.

I keep in mind the sunshine. And the sensation. I can nonetheless really feel it now, greater than 20 years on.

That awakening, that feeling, is in the end why Oceanographic exists.

Not the one purpose, in fact. There was additionally the urgency of the disaster, the assumption that nice journalism and images may transfer folks in ways in which knowledge alone couldn’t. But beneath all of it was that unnamed feeling.

But there was no phrase for it. Not in my language, at the least. I didn’t even have an consciousness of it actually; it lived in my unconscious, a silent and unknown vitality.

Then, on a transparent evening in Bilbao final May, Guest Editor Oliver Steeds and his sister-in-law Lulu stood wanting up on the stars, speaking in regards to the Overview Effect – the cognitive shift astronauts describe after they see Earth complete from area, fragile and borderless. And Lulu requested: Is there one thing comparable whenever you go the opposite approach? When you enter the ocean?

The Innerview.

As Oliver relayed that dialog and his ideas to me, 20 years of feeling crystallised. That phrase – his phrase – was it.

Then got here the query: Did I wish to discover the thought additional in a Special Edition of Oceanographic?

There wasn’t a second of hesitation.