My mom has always called me a water baby, and it has never stopped being true. I was the one you could not get out of the pool, the one who stayed in the bathtub until his fingers pruned, the one back in the ocean before his towel was dry. Here is the part that surprises people, though. For all of that, I did not actually learn to truly swim until the fourth grade. For a long time I was afraid of going underneath the water, afraid of what I could not see below me. A water baby who would not put his head under. I grew out of the fear eventually, but I never grew out of the pull. So it should surprise no one that the next thing I want is to freedive, and this summer I am going to Tulum, Mexico to learn, in a cenote.
I have never been to one. I have seen the pictures and read about them, I know what they are on paper, but I have never stood at the edge of a cenote, and I cannot think of a better place on earth to learn to dive on a single breath. A cenote is a natural sinkhole, a spot where the limestone bedrock of the Yucatan has collapsed and opened a window straight down into the groundwater running underneath it. The water is rain, filtered slowly through the rock for years, which is why it comes out looking almost unreal, glass-clear and still and cool, with visibility that runs a hundred feet and farther. There are thousands of them across the peninsula. Some open to the sky like a perfect blue well, some hide in caverns where a single shaft of light cuts down through the dark. To the Maya they were sacred. In a land with almost no rivers they were the source of fresh water, and the Maya believed each one was a doorway to Xibalba, the underworld, a place to leave offerings and speak to the gods. You feel that weight before you ever get in.
Freediving is the oldest way into the sea. No tank, no regulator, no bubbles, just you, one breath, and how calm you can make yourself. I plan on getting certified while I am there in Tulum, because there is a real craft to it: learning to breathe properly, to slow your own heart rate, to relax your way toward the bottom instead of fighting the water, to equalize against the pressure as it stacks up on you. I think I hold my breath well, but that is from the shallow end, messing around with my kids at the beach or racing the length of a pool. I have never asked my body to drop meters upon meters on a single lungful, to stay steady against real pressure, and to be calm enough while I am down there to actually look around at an entire other world. That is the part I want to find out about myself. And yes, I am looking forward to the gear, the long-blade fins you see in the photographs, the ones that run close to a meter and a half, where one slow kick becomes a long glide toward the floor.
There are the famous cenotes, the ones with a parking lot and a boardwalk and a line, and then there are the other ones. The ones you do not find on a map. The ones you only reach because you know someone who knows someone, down a dirt track to a quiet opening in the jungle with nobody else there. That is the one I want. Not for the exclusivity of it, but because I want to be alone with it, to drop into water no one else is in and just be floored by what God built down there. The most beautiful places I have ever seen are the ones almost no one gets to.
I have been to Mexico many times before. Isla Mujeres, Cancun, places like that I have truly enjoyed. But I never slowed down here in Mexico. This time I am going to. The people, the beach, the food, the slow pace of it. There is a reason people come back from that coast lighter than they left. And there is something else I am after in the cenotes themselves. I want to go back in time while I am down there, to understand what the Maya saw and felt in these places, why a flooded cave in the jungle was holy to them, a doorway worth leaving offerings at, and to sit inside that history instead of just swimming through it. What I am really chasing, underneath all of it, is the reset, the clear head, the kind of mental freedom you only find when you are far enough off the grid and deep enough in the water that the noise finally stops. Freediving and Tulum are after the same thing when you really look at it. Quiet. Stillness. One breath at a time.
So that is the plan: get the certification, get the fins, find the cenote, and report back. I want to test my mind and my body and see how far down I can actually go, how long I can stay, how much of that other world I can take in before I turn for the light. The water baby is going to find the bottom of something this summer. I will let you know what is down there.
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