Tuesday, July 1, 2025

Deep Sea Diving* "To Be a Bay"* OTD Apps Script with ChatGPT*

 


Deep sea diving.*

In the mornings at our resort in Sturgeon Bay, before anyone woke up, I drank coffee, wrote, read, and looked out onto the bay.  The "background" was constantly changing - the sky, the light, the texture of the water surface.  In general, there was a constantly fluctuating mood.  There was almost always, also, a constantly changing cast of characters: a pelican would fly by, a diving duck would appear, three ducks would fly in formation towards Green Bay, a pelican would clumsily take off, etc.    I had the thought that I could be entertained, diverted, simply by looking out this window, which aimed out towards the bay, 50 yards away.  With a couple cups of coffee in me, this was all ENJOYABLE, better by far than most TV. Even if nothing was happening (in the sense of no main characters doing much), there was always the sense that if I showed the minorest amount of patience, something new would turn up. So, I was thinking not only that I "could" do this, but "I could do this!"  I was like a bored housewife watching soap operas, except my TV was the glass towards the bay.  

Digression: This is a strange realization, because usually, I'm an advocate of "immersion"... that you need to be out in the trees, or on a bike, or walking, climbing, etc, moving through the world.   

In any case, I was returned to this image in my memory of a meditation technique that I hadn't really thought about in 35+ years.  While In high school I read a book about meditation that included an exercise for meditation that asked you to image that you're a deep sea diver (with one of those old space-man-like suits with an iron helmet with a small window).  I opened Claude and asked if it knew if this "deep sea diver" meditation was something it had knowledge about.  It hadn't, but it's gloss about the idea was interesting:

That’s a fascinating meditation concept - using the image of being in an old-style diving suit to create psychological distance and perspective. While I don’t recognize that exact description as a specific named meditation technique, it sounds like it combines elements from several contemplative practices.

The core idea seems to be about cultivating what psychologists call “psychological distance” - stepping back from immediate reactivity to observe life with more detachment. The diving suit metaphor is particularly powerful because it suggests:

- **Limited but focused perception** (the small window)

- **Physical separation** from what you’re observing

- **Acceptance of limited control** (you can’t easily interfere while in the heavy suit)

- **Slowed, deliberate movement** through your experience

This shares DNA with several established practices:

**Mindfulness meditation** often uses the metaphor of being like a mountain watching weather pass by, or sitting by a river watching thoughts float past like leaves.

**Loving-kindness meditation** sometimes includes visualizations where you imagine observing the world from a place of safety and compassion.

**Buddhist “witness consciousness”** practices involve stepping back into the observing self rather than being caught up in the drama of thoughts and emotions.

The diving suit variation is particularly evocative because it emphasizes both protection and limitation - you’re safe from being overwhelmed, but you also can’t rush in to “fix” everything you see. This can be profoundly calming for people who tend toward anxiety or excessive responsibility for others.

I like the concept of "witness consciousness" and "limited, but focused perception" and "acceptance of limited control."  I asked Claude to create meditation instructions for this type of meditation practice, using the tone of Jon Kabat-Zinn and including the detail that I think that I remember from the original book where that involved the process of going deeper into the water, and counting 1-10.  Here's what it developed:

# Deep Sea Diver Meditation: Instructions for Witnessing from the Depths

## Settling In

Find a comfortable position, whether sitting or lying down. Allow your eyes to close, or soften your gaze toward the floor. Take a moment to simply arrive here, in this place, in this moment. There’s nowhere else you need to be right now.

Notice your breathing, without trying to change it. Just let your breath breathe itself, the way it has been doing all along, without any effort on your part.

## The Descent: Countdown to the Depths

Now, imagine that you are beginning a slow descent into the depths of the ocean. You are wearing an old-fashioned diving suit - heavy, protective, with that characteristic round helmet and small circular window through which you see the world.

Let’s count down together as you sink slowly, peacefully, into the quiet depths:

**10…** Feel the weight of the diving suit settling around you, holding you, protecting you. The surface world begins to fade above.

**9…** Sinking deeper now, watching the light from above grow softer, more diffuse. You are safe in your protective suit.

**8…** The sounds of the surface world - the urgency, the noise, the demands - all becoming more distant now.

**7…** Deeper still, feeling the water pressure around your suit, but you are completely protected, completely safe.

**6…** The frantic pace of the surface world can no longer reach you here. You move slowly, deliberately, peacefully.

**5…** Settling into the quiet depths, where there is no rushing, no hurrying. Only the gentle rhythm of your breathing inside the helmet.

**4…** Almost at the bottom now, where the water is still and calm. Your movements are slow and intentional.

**3…** Touching down gently on the ocean floor. Safe. Protected. At peace.

**2…** Fully settled now in the depths, in your protective suit, looking up toward the world above through that small, round window.

**1…** Completely at rest on the ocean floor. Still. Quiet. Witnessing.

## The Practice of Witnessing

From this deep, quiet place, you can see the world above through your small window. Perhaps you see the shadows of boats passing overhead. Maybe fish swimming by. The play of filtered sunlight dancing on the water above.

This is your world now - what you can see through this one small window. And that’s enough. You don’t need to see everything. You can’t see everything. The window shows you just this much, and that’s perfectly fine.

Notice how, in this heavy diving suit, you cannot rush toward what you see. You cannot quickly react or immediately fix anything. The suit slows you down, makes you deliberate, makes you simply… witness.

If thoughts come - and they will - see them like fish swimming past your window. Some are colorful, some are plain. Some move quickly, others drift slowly by. You don’t need to catch them or chase them away. From inside your protective suit, you simply watch them pass.

If emotions arise, notice them too as part of the underwater landscape. Perhaps like the play of light and shadow, or the gentle sway of seaweed in the current. You are protected from being swept away by them. You can observe them with curiosity and kindness.

## The Limited View

Remember, your window is small. You cannot see the entire ocean from here, and that’s not a limitation - it’s a gift. You are only responsible for witnessing what appears in your small frame of vision. The rest of the vast ocean is there, but it’s not yours to monitor or manage.

This is profoundly liberating. You don’t have to see everything, know everything, fix everything. From this peaceful depth, with your limited but clear view, you can simply be present with what is actually here, right now, in this moment.

## When Thoughts of the Surface World Arise

Sometimes your mind might say, “But I should be up there, doing something, helping, working, worrying…” When this happens, gently remind yourself: you are exactly where you need to be. The heavy diving suit keeps you here for a reason. You are practicing a different way of being - the way of the witness, the way of deep presence.

From this place of depth and protection, you can see the surface world more clearly than when you were caught up in it. Your perspective is wider, calmer, more compassionate.

## Breathing in the Depths

Continue to breathe naturally. Each breath fogs the glass of your helmet slightly, then clears. Each breath reminds you that you are alive, present, witnessing. There is something profound about breathing slowly and calmly in the depths, watching the world through your small window with acceptance and peace.

## When You’re Ready to Surface

When you feel ready to end this meditation, you can begin your slow ascent. Count from 1 to 10, rising gradually through the water. But know that you can return to these depths anytime. The diving suit is always available to you. The ocean floor is always there, waiting to hold you in its quiet embrace.

As you surface and open your eyes, see if you can carry some of that deep-sea perspective with you. Remember that you always have access to that small window view - the perspective that sees clearly but doesn’t try to grasp or control everything at once.

The witness consciousness you touched in the depths is always available, even in the midst of surface-world activities. Sometimes, all it takes is remembering the feeling of that protective diving suit, and the peace of watching the world through one small, clear window.

-----

*This meditation can be practiced for anywhere from 10 to 30 minutes. The key is not the length of time, but the quality of presence you bring to each moment of witnessing from the depths.*

To be a bay*

From braiding sweet grass by Robin Wall kimmerer 

My sister’s gift to me one Christmas was a set of magnetic tiles for the refrigerator in Ojibwe, or Anishinabemowin, a language closely related to Potawatomi. I spread them out on my kitchen table looking for familiar words, but the more I looked, the more worried I got. Among the hundred or more tiles, there was but a single word that I recognized: megwech, thank you. The small feeling of accomplishment from months of study evaporated in a moment. 

I remember paging through the Ojibwe dictionary she sent, trying to decipher the tiles, but the spellings didn’t always match and the print was too small and there are way too many variations on a single word and I was feeling that this was just way too hard. The threads in my brain knotted and the harder I tried, the tighter they became. Pages blurred and my eyes settled on a word—a verb, of course: “to be a Saturday.” Pfft! I threw down the book. Since when is Saturday a verb? Everyone knows it’s a noun. I grabbed the dictionary and flipped more pages and all kinds of things seemed to be verbs: “to be a hill,” “to be red,” “to be a long sandy stretch of beach,” and then my finger rested on wiikwegamaa: “to be a bay.” “Ridiculous!” I ranted in my head. “There is no reason to make it so complicated. No wonder no one speaks it. A cumbersome language, impossible to learn, and more than that, it’s all wrong. A bay is most definitely a person, place, or thing—a noun and not a verb.” I was ready to give up. I’d learned a few words, done my duty to the language that was taken from my grandfather. Oh, the ghosts of the missionaries in the boarding schools must have been rubbing their hands in glee at my frustration. “She’s going to surrender,” they said.

And then I swear I heard the zap of synapses firing. An electric current sizzled down my arm and through my finger, and practically scorched the page where that one word lay. In that moment I could smell the water of the bay, watch it rock against the shore and hear it sift onto the sand. A bay is a noun only if water is dead. When bay is a noun, it is defined by humans, trapped between its shores and contained by the word. But the verb wiikwegamaa—to be a bay—releases the water from bondage and lets it live. “To be a bay” holds the wonder that, for this moment, the living water has decided to shelter itself between these shores, conversing with cedar roots and a flock of baby mergansers. Because it could do otherwise—become a stream or an ocean or a waterfall, and there are verbs for that, too. To be a hill, to be a sandy beach, to be a Saturday, all are possible verbs in a world where everything is alive. Water, land, and even a day, the language a mirror for seeing the animacy of the world, the life that pulses through all things, through pines and nuthatches and mushrooms. This is the language I hear in the woods; this is the language that lets us speak of what wells up all around us. And the vestiges of boarding schools, the soap-wielding missionary wraiths, hang their heads in defeat. 

This is the grammar of animacy. Imagine seeing your grandmother standing at the stove in her apron and then saying of her, “Look, it is making soup. It has gray hair.” We might snicker at such a mistake, but we also recoil from it. In English, we never refer to a member of our family, or indeed to any person, as it. That would be a profound act of disrespect. It robs a person of selfhood and kinship, reducing a person to a mere thing. So it is that in Potawatomi and most other indigenous languages, we use the same words to address the living world as we use for our family. Because they are our family. 

To whom does our language extend the grammar of animacy? Naturally, plants and animals are animate, but as I learn, I am discovering that the Potawatomi understanding of what it means to be animate diverges from the list of attributes of living beings we all learned in Biology 101. In Potawatomi 101, rocks are animate, as are mountains and water and fire and places. Beings that are imbued with spirit, our sacred medicines, our songs, drums, and even stories, are all animate. The list of the inanimate seems to be smaller, filled with objects that are made by people. Of an inanimate being, like a table, we say, “What is it?” And we answer Dopwen yewe. Table it is. But of apple, we must say, “Who is that being?” And reply Mshimin yawe. Apple that being is. 

Yawe—the animate to be. I am, you are, s/he is. To speak of those possessed with life and spirit we must say yawe. By what linguistic confluence do Yahweh of the Old Testament and yawe of the New World both fall from the mouths of the reverent? Isn’t this just what it means, to be, to have the breath of life within, to be the offspring of Creation? The language reminds us, in every sentence, of our kinship with all of the animate world. 

English doesn’t give us many tools for incorporating respect for animacy. In English, you are either a human or a thing. Our grammar boxes us in by the choice of reducing a nonhuman being to an it, or it must be gendered, inappropriately, as a he or a she. Where are our words for the simple existence of another living being? Where is our yawe? My friend Michael Nelson, an ethicist who thinks a great deal about moral inclusion, told me about a woman he knows, a field biologist whose work is among other-than-humans. Most of her companions are not two-legged, and so her language has shifted to accommodate her relationships. She kneels along the trail to inspect a set of moose tracks, saying, “Someone’s already been this way this morning.” “Someone is in my hat,” she says, shaking out a deerfly. Someone, not something.

OTD Apps Script with ChatGPT*

I like how Austin Kleon has "on this date, past blog posts" widget on his blog.  I spent a couple hours working with ChatGPT to create a way to create a workaround on Blogger, which doesn't have a widget to do the same thing.  There was no automated way to do this, so I "worked with" ChatGPT to help create some code.  At this point, I do not know what "create some code" means.  I just know that it can code pretty well.  I begin to learn about what App Scripts are in Google Sheets (under Extensions in the top menu).  I told ChatGPT what I wanted the function to be and it created the steps necessary to create a new google sheet On this Day Blogger which would, when you clicked "Run," create the steps to make some code to do what I have at the bottom of this page.  

On This Day (07/01):

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