Tulum Beach at Sunrise after an off-shore storm.
I found this turtle nest at sunrise on Tulum beach. If you look closely you can see the tracks the flippers made as the turtle made its way up the beach to lay its eggs.
A turtle nest marker similar to the one I helped put up with the conservation group.
Tropical paradise one afternoon on the public beach at Tulum, Mexico.
It was a scorcher this day at around 42 degrees celsius!
My underwater camera broke on this trip leaving me with very few usable pictures. This was among the best taken diving off the coast of Cozumel.
Heron shadow clouds,
green turtle fin languishing
in tide's melody.
© raj808, 2023
This trip to the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico in 2018 was one of my favourite travel adventures to date.
I had never visited the Caribbean before this trip but had always dreamed of visiting to explore palm-lined coves, and dive beneath the waves inspired by watching Jaques Cousteau's films.
After watching The Silent World and the fantastic series The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau when I was eight years old I fell in love with the undersea world. Even at that early age, I knew I had to don scuba equipment one day and experience that 'Silent world' myself.
To an extent, I have fulfilled that dream, although part of me still regrets not following my desire to become a marine biologist when I was an adolescent. Life changed and I discovered that I struggled with science, yet had a natural propensity toward English studies/writing.
Since then I have scuba-dived three times in the red sea in Egypt, Cousteau's favourite dive destination, and I have to admit mine as well. And I've dived Thailand, Malta, Lanzarote, various parts of the UK and most recently Mexico. I also managed to fulfil a lifelong dream, and top of any marine life enthusiast's bucket list, while in Mexico by snorkelling with whale sharks.
If you would like to check out footage of that experience, along with a poem I wrote and performed on my YouTube channel, please follow this link.
I believe that a large part of life is making your dreams a reality, this is where true lust for life originates.
Sure, it is important to work and build, but I think far too many people in this world are focused on building a legacy for entirely the wrong reasons. If you build something that primarily exploits, destroys and consumes... you're not building anything constructive. That is simply creating a self-perpetuating mechanism of consumption, which is a legacy of the worst kind.
For me, people who touch the earth lightly, people who help conserve, who appreciate nature for its own sake, and not what they can take from it, even just those people who bum around like me scuba diving in an experiential communion with marine life, these people leave the legacy of ideas! They spread that reverence for the natural world, either through content or simply through conversation.
Walking gently on the earth is not a failure!
Destroying, exploiting, consuming and building with no thought to how it affects the global ecosystem... in my eyes, that is one of the worst legacies anyone can leave.
Thanks for reading 🌿
To read more about the aesthetics of true haiku, and the difference between haiku and senryu, please check out my post: Haiku Vs Senryu - The Aesthetics of Form
All images in this post are my own property.
Camera - Samsung S7 Smartphone
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