unWavering Grief & Gratitude
Learning rhythms of breathing through ecosystemic grief.
I went to the beach in hopes of escaping inner war (fed by outer Wars) and regenerate old, inherited, self-consuming tendencies.
When I got there, the sand and the waves were shouting too:
Do not look away. Look at what lays at your feet.
And I watched. Hundreds of visible plastic pieces. Millions more, invisible, dissolved, bathing my skin. Feeding the Arenaria interpres running cutely along the wet waveline.
I obeyed. I looked. I witnessed.
Thousands of years ago, dinosaurs walked that landscape. I went there also to look at their tracks and think about time objectively. We corrupted the corpses of their contemporary flora into the plastic caps that now get stuck in their fossilized footprints.
Footprints of unaware extinction, I think as I look at my feet once more.
I was looking for beauty to breathe through. I had to breathe through grief instead.
Where I thought to find escape, I found reminder.
And I breathed.
The wave does not cease its motion through the trash. It keeps dancing at the rhythm of lunar gravity.
Where I thought to find a friend… I still found one. One who does not lie: Loving, Raging, Resilience.
Beauty and Trash.
Beauty in trash.
Waves keep rolling, hearts keep beating.
Doldrums within Storms.
unWavering paradoxes.
And all I could think of was the lack of a word that I wish existed in my spoken language, something that simultaneously means “I’m sorry” and “Thank you”.
Something that grieves in gratitude…
Maybe it cannot be a word, but is a rhythm, and it sounds like the ocean.
unWavering grief and gratitude
If you hold a conch to your ear and breathe in and out, you can hear it.
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