Listen to an audio version of this essay here:
Sestina of the Sleeping Seal
Watching the sleeping seal breathe I slip out of my human skin on the rise and fall of waves who began when the wind gave voice to Earth's turning. Heat: pressure builds, then drops, I ride the rush of air inside raindrops, fractalling like alveoli, I breathe because my body remembers for me. I am inside the seal's dream or dreamed by the seal, sun-dried fur rippling, my skin finally fits and I wear it with pleasure, my body fits inside a world ringed by raindrops that will break when they hit rocks below bluffs sliding into the sea without visible resistance. Erosion, my faithful friend, you've witnessed me at my worst, throwing fits and greedily bursting raindrops convinced I was dying of thirst. Forcing everyone to listen to me, I missed the conversation, forgot I was a shapeshifter wearing a human skin. Shapeshifter, here we are again in this body, the same conversation, newborn and bloody, a white pup still held in the surging ocean's dream. Our losses cry out to be grieved. When will this be over? Once I walked around another island, going over all my old failures, the missed conversations, while the gulls spoke with everything. I sat until dark with a dead seal's bloated body, and when I got up I knew I could keep going. Sand scoured my eyes. My feet rolled over rocks like waves. In all drops, what falls fits, the rain told me. This skin, said the shapeshifter. This will never be over, said the waves.
It’s been an emotional week, friends. Maybe for you, too. That’s what I’m hearing from a lot of folks in my sphere. Lots going on in the stars, they say. Something about Saturn and Pisces. It’s all a bit fuzzy to me and I’m somewhat furry-tongued, which I’m finding isn’t the worst place to be in writing you these weekly missives since it opens me up to surrender and synchronicity.
Each week my intent is to conjure something for you out of the mythic as it weaves itself into my daily life in order to show you we are still swimming in mythic waters, no matter what skeptics say. I think most of my readers know this, or if not, you at least long for it. The mythic is not in the past, it’s under your skin and deep in your bones, and every glass of water you drink was once a raindrop and a cloud and a stream and even the ocean.
Pegasus, whose hooves struck Mt. Olympus and gave birth to a stream that is the muse of poetry has been visiting me. I mean this literally. I see him at the bottom of my breath when I pause before inhaling. He has actually always been inside me and I climb on his back and we fly around the stars every day now, and then he drops me back on my porch and I pick up a notebook or this laptop and write a poem or an essay.
Pegasus inspired me to write a sestina this week when he led me to a post in a Facebook group of which I’m a member. The article was about sestinas and written by the poet Terrance Hayes. Here’s a link to the article:
The sestina is a tightly woven poetic form that relies on rolling repetition of end lines to ensorcel the reader. At least that’s how I experience them. Sestinas are witchy and incantatory, and it didn’t surprise me to learn from my Wikipedia research that the first known sestina is attributed to a 12th century Provençal troubadour named Arnaut Daniel.
The troubadours, writing in the Occitan language, developed the ideals of courtly love that still shape our ideas of romance today. Although addressed to human women (most often highborn ladies), their poems and songs were essentially hymns to the goddess in a time when women were political pawns, their fate decided by the men that ruled society. That’s why it wasn’t important to actually attain the beloved, only to praise her through longing. (Alas, this has trickled down to modern times as a dysfunctional attachment to unrequited love.) Through the troubadours, the goddess lived on as the Catholic Church solidified its grip on society through the culture of control we call patriarchy. The songs and poems of the European troubadours fed the animate in the same way we see devotees in India today honoring Parvati or Saraswati with offerings. If you are of European descent, your roots were once fed by holy water. You can still drink from that well, even if you’ve crossed oceans. Bow to the water wherever you are, sing. Remember, as I discovered in the writing of my Sleeping Seal Sestina, that true thirst can only be quenched by praise.
Last week I sat on a wild beach on Kauai with a monk seal watching its fur dry in the sun as its round ribcage rose and fell. I walked on and sat in a stream as it entered the ocean. I let the wind have its way with me. I was quiet for a long time. Long enough for my shadows to rise above my mind’s babble. I acknowledged some things about myself I’m ashamed of, but I’m not thrashing myself. Instead, I’m meeting my shame with tenderness, with compassion, with soothing waters. This poem is my correction. May it find its way to whoever or whatever needs to hear it.
Since I came home I’ve been listening to Beethoven’s late quartets every night and trying to get back in an everyday rhythm, but I am still in the mystic. I tried to go to work today and the power went out as soon as I turned on the air-conditioning.
Who is she who moves the wind, who ruffles the seal’s sun-dried fur and lifts the albatross on the wing?
If you find out, don’t tell me. Tell the moss at the base of a tree, or a bare branch reflected in a puddle. Offer fragrant smoke and something sweet to eat. Honeycomb that draws the bees. Offer a few simple words of praise or the hiss of ten thousand rocks moving as one rumble, as wave upon wave upon wave.
A Further Note:
Dear Subscribers,
I’m going to do my best to include an audio recording of my essays from now on. It came to my attention hanging out with folks younger than me on Kauai last week that a lot of people now prefer to listen rather than read. I heard some online commentator say this was a symptom of millennial laziness, but I’m curious if it’s signaling a return to an oral culture, or a possible reunification of the written and the oral that will also repair the damaged bridge between left and right brain hemispheres, the corpus callosum this newsletter is named for. In the spirit of repair, I hope that my works sing in the air, too, and I hope you enjoy these audios. I am also planning to go back and record audios for essays in the archive.
I’m also hoping that audio versions will add even more value to my work that will be recognized through paid subscribers. Thank you for your support as I continue on with this project. It’s been almost a year!
Kō aloha la ea
Concentrate on love by way of the light