Tracing the Headlands
For The Love of Place and Water
I spoke about the nature of ink, breath, Odette Press, and water in the news last Friday — watch here. Sign up and explore in-person workshops in Chicago. For a more focused experience, schedule a virtual one on one session to start or sustain a meditative writing practice. I’m pausing on the podcast for now; listen to the archive here. Shop paper goods over at Odette Press, share these with a resonant friend, or support by upgrading your subscription.
If I close my eyes I am almost there with the sound of salt water as it whispers and whispers and crashes against the cliffs of the California shoreline, almost there facing into the infinite indigo of undulating waves, skin pressing into the wind that blows off the Pacific. I am here, now, but there in memory, feeling ocean’s pulse against the shoreline. Our lungs expand to hold the salt, the gust, the breeze, the coastal air; the sand below our feet is cold, shifting and morphing as we step down on soaked ground, moving, walking, stepping, tracing terrain along the edge of the headlands.
I am struck, still, as if the memory of a feeling of a place and a landscape could be a note that plays out now, still, ringing perpetually. As if I am the bowl of the memory open to remembering and the landscape strikes the shape of my being and continues ringing out. The sound of place sings: blue horizon, fog clouds, the rolling ocean, thickening succulents covering the cliffside, edges of the earth where the ocean seeps into sky, disappearing into gray purple horizon line. Underneath endless horizon and above the pulse of waves still the stark cliffs that sit upright and firm against the endless force of the rhythm of ocean. Kelp rests on wet sand ground, their iridescent greens laid out as if a beacon to the shoreline. Inland, into the recesses of time and memory, I walk back into the evergreen trails softened by moss and euphoric in pine, then back again to the sun that lays down across the headlands path, onto soft land that stands back beyond the fog, the gray, the cloud.
Here is where the water breathes, it seems to say.
Is it memory or a seal or sea lion I see, bobbing out past the break deep in the waves of thinking? Listening, I can hear gathering seagulls swell with breeze and laughing against the daylight. I watch the back of my eyelids as a pair of flapping black wings announces the presences of ravens. Wind moves waves, sweeping the slopes of the coast and the Mendocino streets, flying out against the ocean that glints against the sunlight. Air breathes over the California tree poppy that waves as if a piece of paper crumpled then opened again and remembered, bright like yolk in the center, as a thin current of wind encourages camphor to stretch from nearby eucalyptus trees in the hours that accumulate after rainfall.
“What is the world?” A teacher asks. I hear: “The world is made up of many worlds; some are connected, some are not”1
I watch the solid horizon now as we walk along the edges of frozen lake. The surface of Lake Michigan is stilled, waves turned to circles like coins as if we are paying the currency of winter, accumulated like the dishes I stack against the edges of the kitchen sink, water frozen to rounds as if dinner plates. I stretch my mind to recall, envision, or imagine places elsewhere in the world: how, say, another season unfolds across the page of the hemisphere and the horizon, in places where lakes and oceans rhythm against hot days as if winter existed only as a question mark, a myth, a mystery.
Memory is its own landscape. I go there to remember the world. I have to imagine a wider world when mine becomes too focused, then bring myself back to the smallest space of now — into breath. Go back and forth to places like the headlands, to days where feet sank soft against the earth, to widen the view. There is the world of soil and surfaces, each with an infinity of organisms and cells, organs in concert and digestion, and the expanses of cities, and the ways we are woven with each other here on this outermost surface of landscape. Life refracts back against a single drop of water. Here horrors scatter, here we are held together in oxygen and determination. Still the hawk flies, and still the parents determine to feed their child, and still the deer stands in the middle of the field in the snow, and still fish swim and spawn in the rivers. Still gulls fly over peaks of the sea and sand, still seasons beckon and motion, still the gentle constant pulse of a breath and oceans, rivers, lakes across the world. Still laughter bubbles up, lifts off, ripples out as if a wave, and still the headlands rhythm with the ocean.
I recall the coastline because it was alive in me as a memory — the sound of it loud, the feeling of it repeating and insistent. I marveled, then, at the ocean, as I stare wide-eyed now into the frozen lake. As I write this, two elongated drops of silver sit dangling from my ears. They, too, exist as a memory from the Mendocino coastline, two shining teardrop shapes around a shell of abalone, their rhythms a reminder movement and material whenever I shift, look to my notes, or reach across the table to take a sip of water, the shell rippling and iridescent like the bodies of water from which the shapes were pulled and cut to form.
Time, places, memories reaching out, making layers over and around each other. And is the world, if not waves overlapping, and multitudes? Mind reaches back to recall water, headland, horizon, and darkest blues. This memory of water and sunlight gives my pointed wintered mind a place to rest. Something to warm to. Maybe I am taken by the ocean — swelled and pulsed and moved — because the nature of water adorns the earth with its movement. Water shows places of our making and unmaking as it changes the shoreline, shows us constancy present in the gentle momentum needed in the face of times of which we may be more inclined to still and freeze. We see the sea in the shell; we see evidence of minerals and water, as colors undulate and wave, as they pool and morph, as they shift, too and catch light. Still, even below the cold-stilled surfaces of water, life grows, moves, morphs. Still, seasons take shape. Water brings mind that is wider, softer, vaster. To love the water is to understand its continued momentum.
From The Studio:
Nourished By, Nourishing
Grateful to learn from this talk. Reading Brian Eno’s A Year With Swollen Appendices. I shared more about the nature of ink, breath, Odette Press, and water in the local news last Friday — watch here. Making spine-like-waves on my mat this week.
From Perfect Days (2023) by Wim Wenders