“Why did you get an ocean tatto?”
Last year in the spring, my family went on a whale watching tour that set sail from Monterey Bay—one of the places that Portolá stopped with my ancestors on the ship. This is part of the unfolding of the mystery of being an adoptee—to learn your ancestry in bite size pieces while you silently crave the whole. At the time I did not know; in hindsight, I wonder if the magic of that day was amplified by their presence with me. We both walked the same land and rode the same sea. It was a chilly March day and I had just received news that a mass in my breast, which needed a biopsy, was not cancerous. I had spent the entirety of my winter with a pervasive looming sense of dread as the doctors assessed the mass. As I stood at the edge of the boat, feeling the wind whip around me and the sea deepen beneath me, I felt grief and relief comingle as I searched the horizon for the exhale I had been holding in for months. In those hours at sea, we rode out over the Monterey Canyon and were likely near its surface where the depths below plummet close to 6,000 feet (MBARI). On the tour, the guide shared that the depths of the canyon offer little food for the sea life there because of the darkness and temperature, and not many creatures can dive to those depths. Most of their food comes from the shores where an ocean current, like a highway, carries material from the surface to the depths. The life there is fed via the death and decay of what drifts as carbon snow to the depths.
There is something about standing above a process like that, as well as such immense depths, which puts us face to face with our smallness and the vastness of the mysteries of our natural world. I know some people who feel claustrophobic in the open ocean, often meeting annihilation anxieties that pulse through all human beings. I did not find myself anxious, but rather at home in the abyss. The trials of my winter had forced me to face a possibility of annihilation. Rolling over offshore surges on a 20-foot boat, I was at the mercy of the ocean and Her will; it gave me the opportunity to confront my own cycles of life, death, and the equilibrium between it all. It is a process that Melissa Nelson relates to as “climate change” and the way it connects to “our own internal climates that have become out of balance; it’s kind of the mirror of human consciousness being like a climate in chaos. They are so interrelated.”
When the natural world and psyche/psychology run into one another, I find the abundant ground of enchantment that Sharon Blackie talks about. It works as a reminder that our path to seeing the world as enchanted requires us to be in touch with our own vulnerability and emotional landscape. Nelson asks, how do we “find solace again in that vulnerability? And to see it as a well of healing rather than a well of grief?” I argue that it is in this intersection where the enchantment comes alive and we remember that “it doesn’t require magic, but it certainly requires attention. Enchantment isn’t about magical thinking; it is about being fully present in the world.” Our physical presence is already solidified on the earth, so what else is being suggested here? Emotional presence. If our physicality has a destructive hand in the natural world, our fundamental work to offset the damage stems from the emotional presence that we may offer, the consciousness that we have a lasting impact, and the reconnection with the earth. The enchantment is in recognizing that the mystery and magic of our living is the same that breathes in all our world. The cycles of loss and death and life and newness that we live also move through Nature. We learn from Nature’s most alive places and the more we listen from our vulnerable and open hearts, we will hear Her stories whispered to us.
Every morning during my time in Carpinteria for school, I go to the beach and talk to Her. Sometimes I talk in song. Sometimes prayer. I do not live in this place, but I do feel that I am somehow woven into the interconnectedness of the story here. I talk to the seals and often they will join my walk and swim parallel to me for a bit. The ocean speaks to me of my own watery existence and allows me to “imagine new stories about the place” that I exist in, and my own “ways of experiencing it.” I have been enchanted by my mother ocean and the reminder that she is my home, just as John O’Donohue says in “In Praise of Water”:
Water: voice of grief,
Cry of love,
In the flowing tear.
Water: vehicle and idiom
Of all the inner voyaging
That keeps us alive.
Blessed be water,
Our first mother.