When we casually pray or utter thanks to our deity of choice, we instinctively look upward. Up is the direction of gods and goddesses, and if we do not believe in those, then up is the direction of space, the vast unfathomable universe. We’ve learned that up is the direction of better things, of progress. But that is not the only direction to which we can look for help, for awe, for beauty. Sabrina Imbler, in their new essay collection “How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures,” looks down instead, into seas and oceans and rivers, finding kinship in the abyss and the creatures that dwell in it.

In the book’s first essay, “If You Flush a Goldfish,” Imbler confirms what I have long suspected from experience with my first pet, Iago (after the “Aladdin” parrot, not the Shakespearean villain), who was 4 when he died: Goldfish can live (and remember) far longer than we assume. In fact, it’s the conditions in which we keep goldfish that contribute to their early deaths. Even though fishbowls are, as Imbler puts it, the “equivalent of a padded cell: smooth, uncornered glass that could never even scrape a scale,” they are nevertheless deathtraps for this species, which urinates so much that the unleashed ammonia can kill them if their water isn’t changed often. While keeping them in bowls is cruel, it’s also true that feral goldfish — those released into well-oxygenated rivers full of food — have “become an ecological menace,” creeping ever closer to oceans in which they should not be able to survive. And yet.

Braided through the fascinating account of goldfish is Imbler’s own narrative, in which they wrestle with feeling trapped in a suburb spread across a smoothed-out former salt marsh. They grow up, plant the seeds of a political self at a local Petco, go to high school, then college. Years later, returning for a long visit, queer and out, Imbler recognizes they’ve changed — perhaps like a goldfish let loose to grow and morph. They discover someone they used to know from high school who has changed, too. Both were “expected to be daughters but turned out to be something else,” and in their brief and intense union, Imbler celebrates that change, fulfilling a desire to know what it feels like “to be unthinkable too, to invent a future that no one expected of you.”

The remaining essays follow a similar pattern. “My Mother and the Starving Octopus” moves between Imbler’s bouts of unhealthy dieting, their mother’s dysmorphic view of her own body and a species of octopus — the Graneledone boreopacifica, whose life cycle involves starving herself as she stays in one spot and protects her eggs. “Beware the Sand Striker” explores the strange creature’s impossibly long history on Earth as well as the way it hunts, which is by lying in wait, invisibly, until its prey comes near enough to grab. The essay also discusses the sand striker’s prior nickname, “bobbit,” which was given in a grizzly homage to a man whose penis was cut off by his wife, whom he had been physically and sexually abusing for years. Weaving in personal experiences with sexual encounters whose tenor has changed to something sinister over the years, Imbler questions the way the stories we tell and the stories we hear affect what we understand about predators and about ourselves as potential prey.

The links between the sea creatures — octopuses, whales, jellyfish and many others — and Imbler’s life are often surprising and sometimes self-aware. In the sand striker essay, for instance, Imbler writes: “I acknowledge this metaphor of predation is cheap. I don’t fault the sand striker for hunger, or for hunting. It works much harder than I do, someone who buys meat already dead and plucked.”

Beyond their metaphorical significance, though, it’s the actuality of the sea creatures that Imbler beautifully captures and renders meaningful: the yeti crabs scuttling across heated pockets in the deepest ocean; the 360,000 blue whales humans killed between 1900 and 1960; the plural identity of salps that swim in chains made up of many clones of the same salp.

There is grief in these essays as well, for the changes that humanity has wrought upon the deep. That grief echoed all the more strongly as I read the book in the days after the mass killing at Club Q in Colorado Springs. Amid the cold reality in which hate crimes against queer people are on the rise, it’s easy to feel as if we’ve stopped making upward progress. But I found both solace and hope in Imbler’s ability to portray a world so foreign it’s barely legible to humans, and to bring forth the myriad ways of being that we might draw on to imagine our way forward through the depths.