Is it possible to love an octopus? I wouldn't have thought so, but then again I wouldn't have thought about it at all. A friend recommended the movie My Octopus Teacher so I went looking for it. Craig Foster went looking too, every day for almost a year, for the octopus he befriended. What began as a diversion from a stale life  became a relationship. Craig learned to observe the oh so subtle tracks of a cephalopod galloping across the sandy bottom of her kelp forest home. 

I was moved by his willingness to be curious. To wonder about and find wonder in the octopus's capacity to change her skin texture and color, to become liquid enough to seep into a crack to stay safe in a dangerous environment. In becoming familiar, he earned the trust of this fascinating animal, such that she sometimes followed him, and curled her two thousand suckers around his hand. Craig watched as she first shielded herself in shells as protection from a pyjama shark, then clung to its back to escape the teeth. He ached when she had an arm bitten off, and visited often in the slow days of recovery. He offered her food as she lay pale in her den. 

Her arm grew back, miraculously, and became as functional as the others. Craig marveled, even as his own passion for life was regenerating. He learned to be gentle, to go slowly, to respect, and to hold his breath for a long time. He is probably the only person to witness the mating of two octopi, and the way she oxygenated her thousands of eggs at the expense of her own life. Perhaps Craig wept as she lay dying, food for the relentless circle of life that has gyrated for millions of years. But what do tears matter when you are immersed in the cold sea? 

Craig's son started to be curious too, and began diving with his father by their home off Cape Town. Perhaps the experience of befriending an octopus seeped into that relationship too.