A Botanical Metaphor

Needing to be oceanographers, needing degrees in aquatic zoology or botany, needing a highly refined aesthetic sense, we so often have to settle for building sand castles in the sand and strolling casually along the beach with our brains addled by life’s minutiae, trying to find in the fresh salty air some new life for our souls. Needing more than the sun-warmed sand we seem to stand in our separate solitudes, strangers in so many ways to ourselves and to life itself. There is, it seems to me anyway, an irreconcilable gap between expectations and outcomes, at least in some areas of life. Sometimes, too, outcomes exceed the expectations; the ocean deeps contain specimens beyond our wildest imaginations. At the turn of the millennium this was actually the case. My hope is that this work will add to this special collection of specimens which oceanographers were truely finding in the dark depths of the ocean.