An Octopus’ Garden of Eden
Last week, my girlfriend and I watched My Octopus Teacher. It was one of the most beautiful films I have watched—one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen. It is a documentary, brilliant with long shots of pristine underwater photography. A middle-aged male, South African photographer had become worn and frayed from many years of civilized life, perhaps angry and apathetic toward his family, overall disheveled. To rescue his and his family’s wellbeing from the cult of productivity that had pained them so much, he decided he needed to return to nature. To step back into the cold Atlantic waters that neighbored his childhood home. Not only neighbored, but quite literally bashed against and spilled through the doors during storm surges. His early life was shaped by the intertidal zone of the Storm Coast, nature’s nurture for him was the bouldered waters, the sea palm kelp forests, the deep churning cobalt blue on copper. And so, in the great course of all human epics, he returned to the world of past times to find his self’s axis.
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