Hello. I am a sea turtle. We turtles don’t actually have names. But you can call me Squirt. Pleased to meet you.

Maybe you’ve never met a talking sea turtle before. Well, I’d like to change that.

The first thing you should know about me is that I’m very old. Much older than you. I was born before automobiles. Before lightbulbs. If I wore underpants, I’d have underpants older than you.

The reason I am writing is because I have something to share with you. I’d like to talk about water. Water is my favoritest thing on earth.

You probably like water, too. But probably not as much as me.

See, water doesn’t just fill the ocean. For sea turtles, water fills the entirety of all I know. To me, water isn’t just a thing. To me, water is all-powerful.

Water contains the most power in my universe. I have seen water swallow islands whole. Filling every coral forest, immersing every sandbar. Water engulfs. Water overtakes.

Imagine water behind a dam. All its weight. All its raw power. All its energy. Just begging for someone to poke a tiny hole in the dam so that tiny stress fractures can soon rupture the steel and concrete which try so feebly to restrain it.

That’s the power of water.

But water is more than just power. Water is my life. You see, water is always around me. I drink by filtering saltwater through glands in my eyes. I eat by allowing the water to bring me bits of food.

Water bathes every fiber of my being, flowing inside me, and outside. Water is in my organs. Inside my muscles. In every patch of flesh. In my bones, and cartilage.

Water fills in my heart. Water is inside my skull. My brain is mostly water. So is yours, actually.

There is nowhere in my kingdom where water is not. Water is even what I breathe—sort of.

Although sea turtles are air-breathers, we also derive oxygen from water. We do this by breathing with our butts.

Yes, it’s true. I am a butt-breather. The technical term for this is “cloacal respiration.” I extract oxygen from the water by moving it over my body. My body is covered in blood vessels. My cloaca, which is pretty much my rear, has many blood vessels. So, scientifically speaking, I breathe with my booty-us maximus.

And I do more than breathe water. Water is all I see. Water is all there is to see.

Water above me. Water below me. Behind me. Beside me. Water cradles me like a mother, supplying me with minerals and vitamins.

The water carries me in its currents, which I slip in and out of. When I rest in the warm Gulf Stream, I can travel thousands of miles, from one side of Earth to the other, without so much as batting a flipper.

And yet, if you can believe this, sometimes I forget the water is there.

Since water is so pervasive, so immersive, so all-encompassing, sometimes I fail to remember that water is all around me.

How, I ask? How could the most vital and most plentiful element on this planetary system be overlooked? How can the essence of life itself be trivialized?

And yet this happens every day. Every hour of every day, millions of us sea turtles forget about the water that supports our life. It becomes invisible to us.

We are selfish and self-centered sometimes, and we forget that the water IS our whole life. Without it there would BE no sea turtles.

But do you know what? The water doesn’t hold it against us. Its feelings are not hurt.

The water doesn’t disappear when you disappoint it. The water is bigger than that. Stronger than that. The water isn’t even insulted. Water is too loving to be insulted.

You can never fall out of the water. There is no such thing as falling out of the element that created you. You are held, whether you remember to be grateful or not.

The water remains in place, feeding you, holding you, carrying you, sustaining you, building you, teaching you, loving you.

We have a saying among sea turtles: “Water is love.”

And so, my earthly friend, is God.