Fish
Crone wonder. //
For most of my adolescence, it was my dream to study the ocean, and life in the ocean, as a marine biologist. I was obsessed with coral reefs, the infinite variety of life in them, sea turtles, all of the dolphins and orcas and whales, but especially humpback whales.
Anyway the reason I’m telling you this is because I just found The Voyage of the Mimi on youtube. I think I was in fifth grade when we watched this as a class, one (or if we were very lucky, two) episodes a day. I was already completely into my marine biology phase, I had even been to Woods Hole, (with my scientist father), so watching VotM wasn’t a conversion experience. However it was a rare opportunity for me to sit in school (this was after we moved, soon after I switched from Montessori to public school) and be totally and willingly preached to about something I was “very seriously” into.
And so a moment – a wave – of nostalgia, for a possible other of myself, if I had kept with the marine biology and become a seafaring researcher. (There are reasons why I changed interests and ambitions, I suppress those for a moment.) It really could have, and perhaps should have happened. I went on special school trips and took internships, studying and surveying a few beaches and reefs. It was my dream to be, perhaps, the Jane Goodall (or Dian Fossey, or Biruté Galdikas) of the sea. Could I have been happy doing that?
Would I be happy doing that now? The wistfulness of questions like these, probing gently for regrets, wondering about the paths not taken. How real they were. If the impossibility had been an illusion, a fata morgana, or if the illusion is what drew me away, to concentrate on other things.
The problem was and always will be, I didn’t want to study the ocean as a scientist. I’ve never been much for details and facts, or rather, for stopping at details and facts. I loved for example looking at sea urchin embryos underneath a microscope, but I didn’t want to answer to a laboratory, or write grant proposals or articles. Well, I didn’t even want a job. I wanted a religion, but real. I wanted to bathe in the details and rub them all over me. I wanted to love the ocean, and fall in love with it, again and again, constantly, and worship it. For a while, science was a ritual of my devotion.
Then there was my childhood eco-activism. If it counts as activism, lol. From fourth to eleventh grade, I was constantly researching ecology and environmental issues for school projects. I gave multiple presentations, for example, on “global warming”. I founded at least two iterations of a marine biology club. I was an official member of countless national eco charities, (it’s where I funnelled all my babysitting money), and I had “adopted” several whales, as well as a sea turtle and a gorilla. We were a diverse family. Posters and photographs of animals papered the walls of my bedroom, the biggest of course was a giant poster of a breaching humpback whale, with its calf. And in this moment of writing, I realize that humpback whale was a savior figure, for my childhood self.
Over the two times I went to Woods Hole, I had enough saved-up babysitting money to buy two necklace pendants from the sea-themed souvenir jewelry shop. I agonized over decisions like this. The first one I bought was the tail of a humpback whale. The second one was a crab. Silver-plated talismans of my oceanic familiars.
(Bonus remembering. Before I loved the ocean, I loved unicorns. That worship didn’t take place as science or activism. Unicorn worship was stories and fairytales and secret gardens of the imagination. It was fantasizing about books with beautifully illustrated covers, then finally getting my hands on those books, and reading them under the blankets with a pen light that I “stole” from my dad. There were so many books, but some that I associate with my unicorn phase were The Secret Garden and The Little Princess, which were not about unicorns, but for me they share the vibe, and The Unicorn Treasury. For some reason, I remember waiting what felt like forever for that book, with intense longing.)
These were my safe places and my struggles for justice, icons in silver and lavender, sea-greens, turquoise, and blues, crusty navies and misty greys, intimate communications with untamed spirits, or bracing inquiry at the unstable surfaces of yet-to-be imagined depths. Where I went to find worlds that were real and meaningful, and perhaps, not subject to the arbitrary cruelties of every other mundane thing.
So I was watching Voyage of the Mimi, which is a dear cultural relic, even if it is very blurry. (It was funded by the Department of Education, bless them. The music is great, especially at the end credits, well, it gets better as it goes.) I was remembering those early passions, and also realizing, with some surprise – this feels vindicating, every time it happens – that important things that are here now have been here from the beginning.
On bad or weird days, looking back, it can feel like I’m surveying a lifetime of dead ends, burnt bridges, failure and rejection and loss. Those struggles seem unending and purposeless. It’s easy to beat myself up over every instance when I failed to fit others' expectations of me, or when I had to part ways with my own expectations of myself. When I gave up on things I thought I wanted because I realized that they weren’t real.
On better days, I wonder at what a survivor she was. How heroically she listened to herself, and protected herself, even when I wasn’t paying attention. And I am amazed to see that life has been a circle, always coming back home again. Often by way of my wildest dreams.
So I call that crone wonder.
//
Our watery roots.
Living with water. // Distant thunder, constant but low, and the atmospheric awareness of a storm. Not here yet, the rain, and it may not come, but shadows gather on the northwest horizon, toward the higher altitudes, near Pupuan.
Taking a (hot) shower outdoors under (cool) sprinkles of rain. The contrast is reviving. With bits of fern and mossy surface surroundings, I feel like a sea nymph. (The soap “includes sea salt, seaweed, and argan oil”.) Like a Nereid, like Achilles' mother, Thetis, and as soon as she enters my mind, I am overpowered by her perspective, her native tenderness toward, sometimes ownership over, Achilles. There’s one story that she dipped him into the Styx, holding him by the ankle. The other story is that she took him in secret every night, when he was a baby, to burn away his mortality. With flame, and the desire for her child to live forever.
The fish love the dry season that never was, the rainy season come early. One day there were splinters of light in the canal, magnetic slivers of translucent peach and orange shooting like stars through the murky green, sun-dappled water. The next day there were more. (We feed them table scraps and leftover cat food, they basically wash dishes.) Now, through their private (unwitnessed by us) reproductive routines, they have filled the canal with their glittering babies, from tiny newborns to about thumb-sized, which scatter at every hint of motion. Meanwhile, the adults watch me do yoga. Their eyes do not blink. Their mouths open and close, attentive expressions. They really do watch. Some are spiny and the color of mud. Some are bright orange, spattered with black, the mouths of these ones like to gape wide open. Some are pale, almost white, with long, diaphanous fins. They linger underneath tangled and raggedy roots. They float past, with their streamers of chiffon, these otherworldly angels. Fish energy is quiet and serene, arhythmic nibbles at nothing, until it is lightning fast, or surprisingly strong, the peck and pull at seeds of grass, a torpedo aimed at the next shadow down. A heavy splash, ker-plunk, in the dark of the night, and no other symbol than that.
The canal (so far) runs around two sides of the house, catching the rain that cascades from the roof. To us, it’s a strategy for living with water. But rain is their element, their power, and nothing makes them more at home. We are surrounded, in sleep, by the dreaming of fish. And when it rains, we sleep in a different dimension, of warmth and light, ensconced beneath their waterfall.
Waterways.
Offering for fish.
Intensification and a crushing-in by sound that triggers claustrophobia. Awake in dark. Loudness outside everywhere pressing in on our small room. An image comes, half-speculation, of rushing rising from below, lifting up this piece of earth. Anxiety of infinitude. How (could it not be empty yet)? Where (is it all coming) from? The sheer scale of element overwhelms the primate calculation. Ocean, immense. A spare fraction of her being is enough to wash us (and drowned dreaming) all away.
(Stop thinking about anything else, stop writing, cover eyes, and become fish.)