And The Stories Continue...

Photo by Michael Hewitt

 Once there was a black-haired boy who went to sleep on a bed of kelp in the middle of the day, cradled and rocked, lulled by green-blue sea song older than existence. The boy was a very old man when he told me this, but there was no reason to doubt him, for I have stood at the shore and seen the kelp beds in the Channel, drifting in fields so dense I could picture the Chumash people anchoring their tomols and tiptoeing across seaweed bridges to Santa Rosa Island. 

And I have witnessed barefoot children dancing on the sand, flinging seaweed boas over their shoulders, twirling seaweed lassos or holding kelp-tailed kites, and popping seaweed bubble-bulbs––young humans being jubilant.

“Every story begins inside a story that’s already begun by others,” wrote the poet Richard Blanco. “Long before we take our first breath, there’s a plot underway, with characters and a setting we did not choose, but which were chosen for us.” 

I have always been fascinated by the stories of those who came before us, the personal ancestral tales we carry in our DNA, and the ones that shaped the context. I have been gathering stories for years, through interviews on my oral history website, The Living Stories Collective, but sometimes I simply listen for the stories on the wind as I walk, knowing I am only passing through, a flickering continuation of a greater tale, and may wisdom and humility accrue.

And I am still amazed that my story brought me here, washed up on a shore nearly three thousand miles from where I started. It’s incongruous for an East coast girl who never learned to swim, but I walk and watch and listen.

On Inauguration Day, 2009, my friend and I drank champagne and ran into the surf, she in her bikini, me in my rolled-up jeans like J. Alfred Prufrock. The water was icy cold, and we squealed. She went swimming in the distance while I squatted down until the water touched my neck, then I leaned back to let it wet my hair.

Now another inauguration approaches, and our history is weighted with unimagined heartache, and there is more weariness than joy in our hearts, but we are hopeful.

“Everything becomes cyclical,” the late Jane Hollister Wheelwright once told me. “There is no streamline you can hitch onto, this after this after this, it’s all cycles.”

Rural life at the edge of the wild certainly reinforces this, and there is comfort and continuity in the seasons and the work that each requires, and rest when it comes. But within those cycles runs a zigzag of history, and it can be a wild and unpredictable ride.

Another local elder I interviewed decades ago said this: “Always be careful of old people giving advice, but if I could give you any words of wisdom, it’s this: be ready to accept change, rapid change. Things are going to change dramatically, whether you like it or not…Learn. Be ready to change.”

I’m ready. As David Whyte has said, there is a conversation in progress. If you want to be part of it, you can either fall in, or step in voluntarily.

Sometimes at night I can hear the ocean’s muffled crashing behind a foghorn or a passing train. Once the moon broke into pieces that floated on its surface and I tucked a shard of light into my heart.

Now picture kelp forests undulating in shallow seas, and children running on the shore. They are doing the things we used to do, continuing stories many have not heard.