We live a few moments’ walk from the coast clifftop path at Southbourne-on-Sea. From here, look West, East and South over the long reaching fin of the north east Atlantic. Call it The Channel; call it La Manche.

The surface is forever breathing, changing, surprising, pleasing.

Today, it’s the teeming collective sea-lives I am visualising, as I stand sentinel, like a little lighthouse, and I open myself up once more with awe to my submariner senses.

I take my imagining under and my alter-image goes deep.

I am discoverable in the nakedness of the depths. I tense and relax inside of the almost limitless cubic salty kilometers.

I wander alongside the floating populations, the slow tribes, the single species. Giant extended families who move with one accord. And I too can float with the slowly, lowly, barely visible water-clouds of diatoms.

I strain a little to observe down towards the shallow floor, and I am entranced by the swaying dark slippery wavy forests of kelp. My flanks, my skin have become receptors of spatial data. As the pressing of the water increases, so the light diminishes.

My senses are minutely informed by the varied vibrations of frequencies within enormous bands of pressure. These extend from noises of top frothing waves to far abyss in realms of unimagined extent, ruled by silence and sacred, prehistoric lightlessness.

The shifts of temperature and pressure in these vast waters I compare, in my air-breather way, to the hourly, diurnal and seasonal colour changes of our familiar and welcome domed sunlit skies.

Let me salute the salty creatures, let me breathe a breath of gratitude for our brethren beasts, or great, or small, whose horizontal business of thriving alive counterbalances our own. We vertical humans are not alone!

[For the photo, my thanks to Zippo, loyal friend and guard to Heike Jenkins, DrumCircle leader extraordinaire]