Dikya!!!

Splish-Splash

Smell the sea, and feel the sky, let your soul and spirits fly. - Van Morrison

Dikya!!!

OK, I did it. Triple exclamation point.

We learned in school that this punctuation mark is used to express strong emotion or add emphasis to a statement. And yes, I remember in Freshman English, we were told that when using this, less is more. 

However, can I get an opinion?

Can you imagine a world without this excitable diacritical notation in triple?  

What would you do if, just bobbing up and down the salty waters in a Las Piñas beach just south of Manila, you suddenly see a pulsating umbrella-shaped bell with a tassel of trailing tentacles moving with the tides?

What if, just playing splash with your brothers and cousins, you spot a free-swimming marine animal laying in wait behind a brown sargassum seaweed?

For sure, you'd be excited. Really excited.

Being chased by a jellyfish, dikya in the vernacular, was one of our simple childhood pleasures.

It was beautiful, spineless, and wobbly. 

Looking at it, we could imagine its own little world, there among terraces of coral and red galunggong mackerel and climbing martiniko perch. Anchored to the seabed in an untouched oasis beneath the waves where bisugo fish weave through huge sea sponges while whale and tiger sharks glided overhead. 

We were kids.

Our minds were crazy with horrid possibilities.

We delighted in the fact that one, or a 'smack' of them could pursue us with impunity. (I now know the term is suggestive of what it feels like when you suddenly get caught in a group of jellyfish).

And how fun to swim away!

If you didn't? Their tentacles were armed with stinging cells which could injure a 'predator' which you were at the moment.

At one time or another, some of us had been stung. But there we were, proudly showing off red pelts as a badge of courage to our friends.

In my adult years, I've come to recognize every time I stand before a body of water that there is another world underneath. One that is bigger, more real. Occupied by marine plants and critters, usually underrated, but which are everything that’s right in this world.

Such as the jellyfish.

If you watch it long enough, it begins to look like a heart beating. It's the pulse, the way it contracts swiftly, than releases. 

Like a ghost heart - a heart you can see right through, right into some other world where everything you ever lost has gone to hide. A near-transparent moon jelly with its flashing red light chasing you.

Don't you think that deserves an exclamation point?

Or two.

Or three.

Let exclamation points run rampant and wild and free.

Say it with me. 

Dikya!!!