Dive Into Your Imagination

***Special alert!  I am heading to the Galapagos from August 5th until September 6th.  I will be on an expedition, but there are still a few spots available.  If you are interested in joining me in the Darwin Arch Club to scuba dive or snorkel with whale sharks for one of four weeks, please contact me as soon as possible at annie@anniecrawley.com *** After several months of development I am launching my new website specifically to highlight and promote the speaking side of my business.  Please help us celebrate by visiting www.AnnieCrawley.com and considering me for your next conference, event, keynote speaker or school presentation.  Please take a moment to let me know what you think!  I would like to thank my colleagues who helped make this site possible: Richard Salas for an unbelievable studio session to get professional images and Taylor Reaume of The Search Engine Pros who is an internet guru.  This week I am attending the National Marine Educators Association Conference in Gatlinburg, Tennessee and it has been four days of action packed learning, networking and fun.  Surrounded by educators from across the nation being represented by teachers, professors, Aquarium Education Departments, NGO’s and corporations setting the pace for the future in Ocean and Great Lake Education to be incorporated into K-12 curriculum.  Last night we were treated to an unbelievable experience at Ripley’s Believe It Or Not Aquarium of the Smokies.  They have tunnels so you can get a birds eye view and actually get behind the animals within the exhibits.  We also danced to an unbelievable band, The Chill Billies underneath a quote by Jules Verne, speaking as Captain Nemo, “The Sea is a vast reservoir of nature.  It was through the sea that the earth so to speak began…”   And so I joined the Ocean Literacy Committee in the NMEA who has been lobbying to get Ocean Literacy into the national standards of education.  This next round will determine what teachers will need to teach for the next 15 years so it is imperative we let our voices be heard for the need of Ocean Literacy in the classroom.  Dive Into Your Imagination lesson plans for Pre K through K and First to Third Grades will be releasing in late 2010.  These and our new adventures of Ocean Annie Books have been partially funded by a grant from Save Our Seas so we are very excited to have them meet national and international standards!  As I write this, we are getting ready to hear from our keynote speaker, Shark Lady Dr. Eugenie Clark, who told me one of her favorite experiences was scuba diving with whale sharks for the first time!  And I could totally relate because my life changed during the summer of 2001 when I dived with whale sharks for the first time in my life.  Here are a few highlights from Dr. Eugenie Clark’s keynote speech.  I wanted to bring you here with me to learn a few of the reasons she was awarded the NMEA’s Lifetime Achievement Award.

"To know is nothing at all; to imagine is everything."  Anatole France
 
Tens of thousands of people are afraid to put their face in the water and many more just do not like it. Fears drive us and many people have a complete disconnection with the Ocean because they are afraid of it and can not relate.  My sister falls into the second category, she does not like putting her face in the water, yet when she became a mom she made a vow not to instill her fears into her children.  I believe that many of us are frozen in fear and our role models often base their decisions on their fears that they unknowingly pass onto us.  And then decision makers and government officials often play upon the fears of the masses and use it as a means of control.  Can you remember a time in the past 9 years that you have not flown without being advised of an orange alert?  We tend to ignore the messages after we hear them too often and yet accept things because we feel powerless over change.  How many of you have started tuning out what is happening in the Gulf because of a variety of reasons from helplessness to disbelief to how can we possibly wean ourselves off of oil to oh my gosh, when are they going to stop it?  Just tell me when it is over.

We know we are dependent on oil and that there are alternative energies available, but right now if we switch there will be costs associated with it.  How can we think of spending more money when we are suffering an economic crisis, yet how can we not?  The dollar amount is ticking, the latest number published was the clean-up effort is already at 2.5 billion dollars.  We need a mind-shift to happen at all levels of our society.  When I first visited my sister and family in Australia 8 years ago, Hannah Rose was 2 and she had no fear of water.  I photographed and videotaped Hannah and she was one of the first children to be featured in our DVDs.  As a matter of fact Hannah and all of my other nieces and nephews are the reason I created Dive Into Your Imagination to change the way a new generation views the Ocean and themselves.  You see, we as adults just have completely missed the plot in getting government and corporations to embrace our environment.  We are all connected.  Last week I was able to take Hannah on her first scuba diving pool experience.  Their family is visiting the states and I wanted to give the gift of breathing underwater to Hannah and her father because of the great impact her birth had on my professional life.  My sister still does not enjoy putting her head underwater, but her daughters are mermaids.  As we explored Seattle together, we walked through the Science Center gardens and I came upon this glass statue of words.  I love words, sayings and quotes and this summed up my feelings about what is happening in our world, “To know is nothing at all; to imagine is everything.”  Anatole France

What do you do when nobody else is watching?  When the voice inside your head talks, do you like what it is saying?  Have you ever woken up and felt like your life was not your own?  Can you do more than what you are doing today?  Taking action begins with a mind shift.  Before we can do anything in life, we first must believe it is possible.  It has been 52 days since the Gulf Oil Explosion occurred, more than forty years since the oil spill in Santa Barbara instigated the first Earth Day and a mere 2 days since we celebrated World Ocean Day on June 8th, but what does this all really mean?  For the past six weeks I have been watching and listening to the news from two perspectives, from what is actually happening and also from the angles the media portrays.  The bottom line is simple: we have to completely overhaul our systems.  We need a complete rework on the politics and business of how we as people interact with our environment, yet before this will happen, we have to change the way we think about ourselves, and our environment.  Albert Einstein said it best, “We can’t solve the problems of today by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”  What is happening in the Gulf of Mexico right now is affecting us all in many ways, but have you stopped to ask yourself, how does this really affect me?  What can I do?  Where do I fit into the bigger picture?  You have to believe you can and do make a difference, that a disaster affecting the Gulf impacts your life in a multitude of ways and that you can make a difference.  During the past two years Dive Into Your Imagination has been working on a new series of books, DVDs and lesson plans to change the way a new generation views the Ocean and themselves.  During the next couple of months you will start to see the work we have been producing. We are going to need help getting them into schools across the nation and throughout the world because I truly believe that if we raise a generation recognizing our interdependence on our Ocean and environment that the crisis we are experiencing right now would be prevented.  We have to work together to visualize a new tomorrow. 

Where do I begin?  For the past 21 days, I feel as if I have been holding my breath as I have watched the world news.  We went from the cloud of ash from the Eyjafjallajokul Volcano in Iceland to potentially one of the worst environmental disasters in the last century as the Deepwater Horizon Gulf Oil Spill continues to flow.  I have had to follow the golden rule I teach and learned while scuba diving: Stop, Think, Breathe Slowly and then Act.  When we react to circumstances instead of taking action, we can create problems greater than what triggered an event.  Do you know silent and listen have the same letters?  During the past few weeks I have remained silent and listened.  There have been two major forces affecting me, the constant stream of information from social and news media, and also the internal voice of wisdom that has become ever present in my life as I learn to look within for the answers.  Less than two weeks ago I flew to Chicago to be inducted into my Carl Schurz High School’s Hall of Fame.  My high school was celebrating it’s Centennial Anniversary, 100 years.  Carl Schurz was known to have said, “Our country, right or wrong.  When right, to be kept right, when wrong to be put right.”  And as I participated in all of the festivities of the weekend, this saying kept running through my head.  We are experiencing very large wrongs in every aspect of our lives right now from the economic breakdown to our environment.  Who will raise their voices with me to help put what we have done as a society back from wrong to right?