(127/366) Fluid Grace

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May 6, 2012 – We had family in town, and with the Vancouver Aquarium just five minutes away, we thought we’d pop down and renew our annual membership. The money goes to a wonderful research and rescue program, and it’s a fabulous way to spend a few hours.

When someone says turtle, you probably think of a slow, awkward, graceless creature.

I think of this beautiful creature, soaring through the fluid of the sea. I’ve had the pleasure of encountering them in the wild when snorkeling, and I was mesmerized by the dance they perform as they drift effortlessly through the dappled water. They are so perfectly in tune, in harmony with their environment.

Some of my other favourites include the Grunt Sculpin – a short, squat little fish, but it has its own elegance, its little fins carrying it along like a little drifting balloon. The jelly fish is an unsupported mass out of water, but in the sea it is a beautiful, shimmering, organism, repeating a pulsing sequence of steps, carried out to music only it can hear. And the sea lion – an awkward looking animal ashore, lumbering and heaving about on the rocks. But when it moves into the sea, it slipstreams through the water like a silent torpedo, changing direction on a whim, its curiosity carrying it forward to investigate, then pirouetting off into the shimmering blue leaving nothing but bubbles in its wake.

The most awkward looking creature can have such a fluid grace to it when it is in its own element.

The same thing goes for people too. Some people seem awkward, forced, over-compensatory in the wrong circumstances, in the wrong environment, with the wrong people. But get them into their proper element and they can shine, they can find their own fluidity, and others will suddenly admire them for what they are, instead of what they are trying to be. Sometimes we lumber, but we can find our perfect environment, find out own fluid grace, if we look in the right place and with the right people.