I remember the light. And the feeling. I can still feel it now, more than 20 years on.

Off a small island in the Bay Islands, I slipped beneath the waterline for the first time. I had been told what to expect: the sensation of weightlessness, the hues of blue that don’t exist on land, the marine life. What nobody told me was what the experience – and the many thousands of revisits since – would do to me. What it would quietly, permanently rearrange.

As the surface receded – that bright, shimmering ceiling moving further away – something shifted. Something I couldn’t name. I felt an awareness I had never experienced before. I was entirely present. I saw our planet and my place within it – truly – for the first time.

Until that day, I had been living a half-life. The experience wasn’t religious, exactly, though it had the texture of something transcendent. It wasn’t simply the beauty of what I was seeing, though the beauty was real. It was something about relation – about being reminded, at a cellular level, that I was not separate from this. That I came from this. That it runs through me whether I’m in the water or not.

I remember the light. And the feeling. I can still feel it now, more than 20 years on.

That awakening, that feeling, is ultimately why Oceanographic exists.

Not the only reason, of course. There was also the urgency of the crisis, the belief that great journalism and photography could move people in ways that data alone could not. But beneath all of it was that unnamed feeling.

But there was no word for it. Not in my language, at least. I didn’t even have an awareness of it really; it lived in my subconscious, a silent and unknown energy.

Then, on a clear night in Bilbao last May, Guest Editor Oliver Steeds and his sister-in-law Lulu stood looking up at the stars, talking about the Overview Effect – the cognitive shift astronauts describe when they see Earth whole from space, fragile and borderless. And Lulu asked: Is there something similar when you go the other way? When you enter the ocean?

The Innerview.

As Oliver relayed that conversation and his thoughts to me, 20 years of feeling crystallised. That word – his word – was it.

Then came the question: Did I want to explore the idea further in a Special Edition of Oceanographic?

There wasn’t a moment of hesitation.