To Live in Growing Orbits, Vol. III: The Name

A journey through the stories in Piko: A Return to the Dreaming

This is the third installment in a series journeying with the folk tales and myths I tell in my memoir, Piko: A Return to the Dreaming. Each entry is a free-standing essay, but readers interested in reading earlier contributions can find them in the archives or through links at the end of this post.

Note: This is a long post that has exceeded Substack email limits. To read its entirety, click the “view entire message” link when prompted to at the end of this email. Thanks for reading and enjoy!

Photo by Aron Visuals on Unsplash

Tick-Tock

How do you measure time? By the traditional ticking of a clock, dividing your day into hours that break down into minutes that erode into seconds? Seconds counting down your life until no one flips the hour glass over? Do you never have enough time, feel owned by it, or are you one of the few who feel you own it? Whatever the case, it’s something that possesses us, or that we possess, meaning it keeps us apart and blind to the greater truth of what a day actually is, a turn of Earth on its axis, itself orbiting around a ball of fire named Sun.

If you were raised in Western Civilization, or any industrialized nation, most likely you were conditioned to experience time as the former, not the latter. You are defined by mechanical ticks, not mysterious orbits.

But time has other forms, more ancient than our mechanisms, rhythms and cycles that move through the bodies of trees and animals, and yes, humans, though most of us have forgotten them.

I remember receiving my first watch as a kid. How marvelous! I could tell what time it was by looking at my wrist! Watches back then had to be wound in order to keep ticking. What a sense of responsibility I felt turning the tiny knob just far enough to keep my watch running. I also remember my first digital watch that didn’t have to be wound. What a miracle! As long as the battery was good, time took care of itself. I loved wearing a watch as a youth because it made me feel like I was part of the adult world where people got to make their own decisions. Wearing a watch, I felt someday I would grow up and be in charge of my own time.

And I remember, age eight, receiving my first clock as a Christmas present. It was a boxy Sony clock radio with a brown case and blue face. Time was measured by three-dimensional pieces of plastic called “hands” that moved around the dial where hours and minutes were marked by white lines etched in the blue plastic.. To change the time required turning another knob, although the clock was electric and didn’t have to be wound like my first watch. The first time I ever turned it on the song “Come Sail Away” by Styx was just beginning. I lay on my pink canopy bed and listened in rhapsody to the music coming out of the little box. Time, in the form of that clock, became an invitation to adventure.

Sing with me!

I'm sailing away
Set an open course for the Virgin Sea
'Cause I've got to be free
Free to face the life that's ahead of me

The adventure of time was concurrent with the end of my childhood. By the time I was a teen, watches and clocks were digital and time changed. Now, time was a flashing red light next to my bed telling me it was time to get up and get to school where I had to get the grades to get into college, and when I got to college time became all about deadlines. Get to class on time, get that paper in, apply for grad school, etc. No matter how many deadlines I successfully met, the pressure was always building.

Out of Time, or Time-Out From Time

I could have stayed in that version of time, but I didn’t. Without much thought, motivated equally by delusion and depression, I moved to a small island where time existed in multiple dimensions, all occupying the same ten-square mile space. Some residents there lived mostly by the clock, especially in the summer when the quiet island turned into a carnival of summer tourists, others lived according to nature’s cycles, timing their lives on the tide—clammers, gardeners, fishermen. Most people lived in a combination of both, or maybe even three or four kinds of time. Winter time, summer time, deer hunting time, surfcasting time, scalloping time. In spring, time sped up as all the island workers rushed to get ready for the influx of summer tourists and second homeowners. In fall, time slowed as the wind shifted from balmy southwest breezes to n’oreasterly gusts that rattled homes and stripped sand from the beaches, revealing layers of eroded pebbles underneath who were so intimate with time they had no need to measure it. They were time itself, eroded and eroding—earth, fire, wind, and water, cradled in the palm, received by skin and the delicate bones beneath as the weight of death’s inevitability without fear, a generous tug downward into the layers of mystery that hold us to a place where, if we ourselves hold steady, the outer circumstances of our lives reflect the deep springs of our inner lives where we discover ourselves in God, no matter where we are.

Just through this act of union we bless the world, even if we never write a poem or paint a picture of it, or even speak of it. You have seen these people. They are the quiet ones sitting in the corners. Their eyes shine. They have crows feet and smile lines. Sometimes when you are around them you want to cry for no reason. Other times, their presence soothes like a hand rocking a cradle. These are people who accept time at its own pace even its sped up by a clock. That’s what happens when you allow yourself to be weathered by wind and waves.

There was a long stretch before cell phones where I often didn’t keep track of time at all. I would hike down a bluff and drop myself down on the sand like a seal and melt through layers of sand and stone, travel down hidden waters, until I was touched by the core itself. Clock time also didn’t keep track of me.

This island is the fairy realm, one of my friends used to say. She was using the term disparagingly, implying those of us who lived there year-round never grew up, and there were certainly some Peter Pans in our midst, myself included.

But—and perhaps I can say this only because I left, eventually answering the call to “grow up,” which in this case was only partially about accepting the received adult responsibilities, and was more about finding ways to be of service in a practical way in the material world —a good stretch in the fairy realm may just be what many of us raised in industrialized nations need. Think about it. Peter Pan never gave into the pressure of time. He never lost his sense of wonder.

Of course there were sacrifices for all my years with the fey—financial stress, being mocked and misunderstood and the subsequent low-self esteem that ensued, loneliness, anguish, visions of apocalypse before anyone was even thinking about climate change —but there always are for anything really worth knowing or having, although those two words don’t really describe what happened to me in my circles around the sun outside measured time. Knowing and having imply meaning and possession, while what I really learned laying on those sands that had never passed through an hourglass, was how to be.

How to be in wonder. That day I stood across from the doe in the snowy field! That day I discovered where the cormorants sleep high up the bluff in the most remote corner of the island! That night the house shook from the wind and survived till morning! My friends’ radiant faces across fires on the beach. Fresh-caught striper we grilled with potatoes wrapped in foil placed right in the coals. The sound of my brother’s guitar and voice playing just the right song…

It was wonderful. Full of wonder.

Time, the way it’s presented to us through technology, amped up exponentially through smartphones, would have us pass wonder by, forget wonder completely until we are automatons, doing our jobs to keep the people above us who control it free.

But wonder is always accessible, even from within time. And remember—as long as we are still organic human beings—we can still make choices.

photo by author

Wounded Healers

How do you want to experience time?

I’ll ask myself first, because that feels most responsible. The Corpus Callossum Chronicles is my personal experience of the mythic in modern life and often deals with my own difficulties that I do my best to transmute, as a wounded healer, into something that adds to your life. (For those not in the know, the original wounded healer was a centaur named Chiron, a great teacher, who had a wound that would not heal. He eventually gave up his immortality in exchange for the libration of Prometheus, punished for giving fire to humans, and was placed by Zeus in the sky as the constellation Centaurus.)

Because I am still a little insecure about this, having been conditioned to think of focus on the self as selfish, and by academia to see the personal as less than scholarly investigation, I doubt myself whenever someone unsubscribes from this newsletter. Not the paid subscribers. People can’t afford it or just don’t think the work has financial value. That doesn’t hurt the way it does when I lose free subscribers. Why would someone unsubscribe from a free subscription unless they didn’t like what I was doing, unless they’re judging me as self-absorbed and irrelevant?

The narrative I’ve been telling myself about unsubscribes is because what I’m sharing is too personal, too metaphorical, too esoteric, not what people want in this flattened culture where everyone is in a rush and wants you to get to the point in as direct a way as possible. Stick to the facts, be more objective, I hear in my mind. In other words, lobotomize my right brain and let the left brain rule, mutilate the feminine and allow the masculine to divide and conquer the imagination until its forgotten it even exists. All the things that break my heart and would crush my spirit if I let them.

I do not consent to that.

You don’t have to either, and of course this narrative I’m telling myself is an assumption that tells me more about myself than any of those unsubscribers. That’s where I have work to do, and I will keep telling the little girl inside me who thinks she needs to do to be loved, that my love for her is not conditional. I will continue to expose where I’m vulnerable because I know that’s the real balm for the wound.

I’d like to think doing this would help others, but it doesn’t matter if it does. Healing ourselves does heal the world, even if we never see the results we crave. Know that.

I’ll tell you, I have to tell myself over and over: If it helps me, that’s enough. I am ever moving toward the merging of my inner and outer waters, and as Heraclitus told us eons ago, you can never step in the same river twice. Maybe some day it won’t bother me if people unsubscribe, even if they write and tell me it’s because they think I’m selfish, long-winded, and of no use to anybody or anything. (That has never happened, by the way!)

Synchronicities always let me know I’m onto something important. This morning, in a post by my favorite astrologer

Louise Edington

, I read about the Centauric processes currently moving through our collective. Here are her words: (Click on the green link to subscribe to her illuminating and entertaining Substack,

Cosmic Owl

.)

These Centauric processes are subtle but require vulnerability and connection, and the sharing of stories, to help us to move into a more connected world. You might remember someone left this blog because she found it ‘too personal’. I honor her choice, of course. No one is required to stay. But this is what these Centaurs tell me is needed. I share snippets that I think may help you to follow this wonderful healing path the Cosmos is offering us in the hope that it will inspire, turn a switch in a part of you, and encourage you to follow the path of healing generations of trauma as it’s reflected in us..

A reminder that the wonderful Melanie Reinhart says of the Centauric healing process:- 

“A Centauric process will engage both our creativity and also shed light on our pain, confusion, and inner poisons. Some of which will be personal, and to do with our own life and feelings, and some of which will be larger than our own life, possibly to do with ancestors or the collective. Centauric consciousness may be what helps us discern these boundaries and act accordingly…Their region [the Kuiper Belt] contains what is trying to die and what is trying to be reborn.”

Wound Up

Winding into a new spiral, I want to say, most of the time now, I feel a sense of urgency, a pressure building from within, especially when it comes time to write. This urgency causes me to miss out on so many things, like the breeze that lifted my newly-cut bangs off my forehead just now as I placed one hand on my heart, the other on my lower belly, in an attempt to ground and slow down before I began this letter to you. I know my mind is a powerful force. I know my heart is, too. I want to slow down, but most of the time I fail, except when I take naps, which, come to think of it, may be why I like them so much in the first place. When I take a nap, I give my body and mind permission to slow down.

You don’t need my urgency. Nobody does. Certainly not the birds singing off my lanai where magenta bougainvillea and bold red hibiscus thread themselves through a tangle of green jungle with so many dimensions it’s impossible to see them all. And isn’t that wonderful! No matter how hard we try to convince ourselves that everything can be measured, there will always be things beyond us, as long as we are using works like us to describe ourselves. What happens when we stop doing that remains to be discovered, but as long as we are in time, maybe the best thing to do is focus on how to experience it through space, inner and outer, allow time and space to marry within our cells and fulfill the potential of the organic human.

The wind doesn’t need my urgency. It’s just a breeze today. Palm leaves thrusting above the canopy sway in different directions, meeting the air as they are shaped, some leaves taller or heavier, some closer to the ground, all of them rooted in the ancient terraces where Hawaiians used to plant kalo and sweet potatoes to feed the ali’i, who lived below in the Pu’uhonua, the Place of Refuge, where people who had violated kapu could find sanctuary.

I found refuge in that sanctuary, too. Exposed myself there to the sun and black lava. Left the bones of someone I love in that sacred water. Here, from a thousand feet above, I hear messages from the wind and waves rising up the mountain bearing news from the edge. Even though I’m not there, they tell me where I need to grow.

my view

For the past week or so, I’ve felt like I was underwater. It’s a feeling I know well. I pass hours swimming and diving in the ocean. I am also an aquatic bodyworker and dancer. When I lived in Mexico I gave and received bodywork sessions and danced in the lagunas and cenotes for days that passed as slowly as time in childhood. If you’ve lived in Mexico, you know. Time moves differently there, entire afternoons can be passed watching the sun move across a stone wall from behind barred windows that looked like a jail cell. In fact, they allowed a kind of freedom I’d never experienced before, the freedom of saying this is my space without closing a door. Safe behind bars, I was able to slow down.

When I would emerge after hours in those potent waters, I often had to lay down right away when I got out, sometimes for hours. Most of the time these were inland waters, no beaches around, so I’d lay on a splintered wood dock in the sun and re-orient to gravity after being freed from it in the water. It was a time of powerful emotional catharsis. I don’t know if I’ll have another one like it. Right now, I don’t feel like I need that kind of transformation anymore. I am able to metamorphose less dramatically. The water can move through me just by sitting on my lanai listening to the rain, or even from observing the mold on the lanai rafters. Mold teaches me healthy vigilance, rather than the hyper-vigilance I acquired through early trauma. It’s a bold opportunist who would move in and take over my house if I let my guard down, like the squatters did in my old neighborhood in Puna, a place where Pele streams right under what looks like solid ground. Some places in Puna steam rises right out of the ground, the new earth is shiny and sharp as glass, a black mirror that will burn your retinas if you look into it too closely.

No, I don’t need that kind of drama anymore. If I do, the land will tell me. For now, I am blessed to sleep halfway up a mountain above the blue waters of Kona. I know I can never step in the same ocean twice, either, but I am not concerned, for at long last, I have got what I asked for: Time is slowing down.

photo by author

I’ll admit, ss I’ve been typing, some urgency has again been rising. At this point, I know this is just my natural rhythm and I shouldn’t worry. I just need to ride it and write the way surfers paddle hard to catch a wave that will carry them without effort once they are within it. This doesn’t mean I should publish what comes from these sessions right away, or even ever. I’ve learned this the hard way by mistakenly rushing things into print before they’re fully-cooked. When I allow urgency to override my inner knowing (Love me! I think every time before I press publish), I generally end up feeling mortified or misunderstood through no one’s fault besides my own. Nothing is ever done when I first think it is. The push is necessary, but putting the brakes on adds nuance and depth, aside from catching typos. Hidden currents reveal themselves and missing pieces of the puzzle announce they are missing in the first place. The best things I’ve written (and the ones best-received by readers) have all been slowed down through multiple revisions. It takes just as much time for strata of rock to create mountains as it does to wear those layers into sandy beaches.

But I still have to ask, why this sense of urgency? Do you feel it as well? I know urgency is considered a symptom of a nervous system in fight or flight, a biological state we adopted early in human evolution to enable us to escape genuine danger, like a saber-toothed tiger about to kill us, or to get the rush of energy we needed to spear an antelope after we’d tracked it for hours on the savannah. But in Western Culture, most of us feel it all the time now.

Wound Down

Yes, the outer conditions on our planet feel urgent, and some of them are, but for most of us, the urgency is not yet at our doorstep. It may seem counter-intuitive to slow down, but I know, from years of inner work, and from watching the results of my writing released too soon, that it’s the only true way to achieve the safety we all crave.

What I’m saying is that true safety has nothing to do with external circumstances. It’s an inner experience. This may feel offensive if you’re mind is tuned to the external, and I certainly know I’m privileged to be able to write this, but as someone whose life has been in genuine danger, and who re-lived those experiences over and over, bringing the present into my now and creating futures based on fear more times than I can count, I feel I can say now with authority, having freed myself from multiple timelines where my life ends as a tragedy, that safety comes from within. It’s also what humans need most now on our planet if we are going to evolve through our fear and fulfill our individual destinies and collective purpose as a species here on Earth.

That’s why the water—what I could have labelled as low-level depression— slowed me down this past week. In the rush of modern life, going to work, etc., I needed some time in the liminal. Too much air and sunlight. Some murk was required.

Remember the phrase art imitates life? I looked it up to see who said it first and could not find an authoritative answer, although some ascribe it to Plato. I did discover that Oscar Wilde, the king of quips, said it should be reversed—life imitates art.

I was thinking about this yesterday as I struggled to write this post because. The pressure was too much. I could have forced myself to write, but I made a different choice. I was compassionate toward myself. I took a nap and read for awhile. In the past, I would have judged myself as lazy. (I still do that, but not as bad.) I was thinking I wasn’t showing up for this essay and for you, when actually I was showing up the way the essay wanted me to, in order to best write it. In other words, buried under the weight of water, moving slowly up to the surface to see what was going on up there in the air, not only was life imitating art, but art was also imitating life, because the hero of the story I have been trying to write about is a crab, a creature that lives underwater but can also breathe in air. Once I got that first breath above the surface, the water became a little less cloudy and I could begin without struggling, supported by the reciprocal flow that occurs when art and life merge.

photo by author

Facing the Music

Living close to a harbor, I grew up around crabs. Once, walking through submerged eelgrass at the Town Beach, one pinched my toe. It hurt. Crabs became a minor enemy, not as scary as a shark, but still something to be avoided.

As kids we used to pick hermit crabs out of the water, and I’m ashamed to admit, a couple of times I held them in the air long enough the little crabs jumped out. I put their shells back into the water and hoped they would move back in, but I still felt guilty. Fortunately, I did not grow up to be a serial killer.

Later, living on Block Island, I saw fiddler crabs pop out of their holes at low tide and move over the mud as one. I don’t know what caused the sound their mass movement made, if it was their passage through the eelgrass or a sound made by their claws, but the sound always sent a shiver through me. They swerved around me, but I knew if I was dead, they would crawl over me, tearing my flesh off with their one big claw until there was nothing left of me but egret-white bones that would sink into layers of tidal mud that had been shifting this landscape since before time was counted.

Once, I lay with a friend just on the edge of the cool New England-summer water after giving her an aquatic bodywork session. The session was remarkable because she almost stepped on a stingray when we walked out into Cormorant Cove to where the water was deep enough for me to float her. That had never happened before. It was also remarkable because she was a year into a diagnosis of brain cancer. The tumor, woven through her brain like a mycelium, was inoperable. She had been very brave in facing it, one of those people who was always uplifting others, even when faced with the possibility she would die.

I remember the summer sun was so warm that day, but she, so thin with fighting, shook with cold. It was a long journey back to shore from the deep water where the stingray had greeted us. After we exited the water, we lay side by side in the eelgrass. Nobody could see us. The tide was going out. As we lay there, summoning the sun into our cells, I heard them—the fiddler crabs leaving their holes so recently filled with water.

The sound they made was a stiff broom sweeping the firm mud beneath us, relentless as a vulture who can see death from high above, drifting on invisible currents in the blue sky. Though we didn’t speak, we both heard it. The sound of her death announcing it was close by.

At the time, I hoped maybe it wouldn’t actually come, that facing one’s death didn’t mean one had to actually die. Maybe this could be one of those metaphorical deaths that helped her grow into even more radiant light for others, but that’s not what happened. About three years later, she died from the brain tumor. Looking back, I am not haunted by the sound of those fiddler crabs with their one big claw brandished more like a musical instrument than a weapon. I am in awe. The sound of them moving through the grass around us was not the sound of a ticking clock, or the falling of sand through an hourglass, it was the true measure of time, something given to us so we can be aware of the gift of life.

My friend’s time in my time ended, but in her time, somewhere, she goes on.

How did I never realize before writing this that crabs breathe in and out of water?

They are just the medicine I needed to shift me out of the murk that’s been re-forming me these past days. Not quite ready to be a bird, high above looking down, I find myself eye-level with the shore, the edge between where anything can happen, miraculously able to breathe in both dimensions.

Finally, let’s hear now, the story. The second I told to the holy water in the Place of Refuge that became a book I wrote called Piko: A Return to the Dreaming. I never, in a million years as they say, thought a crab could be a hero. As “they” also say—there’s always a first time, right? (I write “they” in quotes because I have no idea who “they” are. If you know, please enlighten me.)

Note: I have never read a written version of this story. I first heard it in the air, the best way to hear a story, told by my friend Jay Leeming, who has a wonderful podcast called The Crane Bag. It’s a magic carpet ride of stories. Check it out!

If you would also prefer to have your first encounter with this story be through air not eye, here’s an audio recording:

Audio version of “The Name” told by Jennifer Lighty

The Name

Once upon a time there was an old, nameless witch who lived in a forest on a mountainside. She was about as mean a witch as could be. Everyone stayed away from her, except for one poor girl she’d bound to her as a slave.

This girl worked day and night for the witch, who didn’t even feed her. One day, as she watched her mistress gobbling a big bowl of rice and beans, she dared to ask for some food. 

“Please, ma’am. Can I have some food?”

“Why should I give you anything you lazy wretch!” the witch exclaimed, shoveling in the last spoonful of beans and tossing her bowl on the cabin floor for the girl to pick up.

The girl cringed and did just that, shuffling away to clean the empty bowl.

“Wait,” the witch called after her. “Let’s play a game. If you guess my name, I’ll give you something to eat.”

“But how can I do that?” the girl cried. “No one knows your name!”

“Not my problem,” cackled the old witch. This was going to be fun.

That night the girl went to bed hungry and hopeless. In the morning when she reported for work she found the witch up to the elbows in blood. “I’ve a hankering for turkey intestines with my beans and rice today. Take these guts to the river in the forest and rinse them.”

The girl gathered up the bloody, goopy guts and headed deeper into the forest toward the sound of water. When she reached it, she knelt on the bank and lowered the intestines into the cool stream. She was so hungry she was tempted to eat a bite raw, but she knew the old witch would find out and she would be punished. 

Suddenly, the head of an eel rose up out of the water and said to the girl, “Give me some of those intestines,” flashing its sharp teeth.

“I can’t,” wailed the girl. Then an idea came to her. “I’ll give you some if you tell me the old witch’s name.”

“I can do that,” the eel agreed, so the girl tore off a bloody hunk and tossed it to the eel, who snatched it in its wrist-crunching jaws and promptly disappeared back under the water.

Disheartened, the girl returned to rinsing off the intestines, worried the witch would be able to tell a portion was missing, when what should happen, but a fish head popped above the surface and demanded the same thing. “Give me some of those guts.” 

The girl figured why not give it another try and repeated her offer. “I’ll give you some if you tell me the old witch’s name.”

“Will do,” said the fish, but as soon as he’d caught the intestines in his fishy lips he was under the surface with no flashing fins in sight.

The girl was really worried now because it was obvious a good chunk of the intestines was gone. There was no way the witch would let her get away with this, so her first reaction when a shrimp popped up and asked her the fateful question was to immediately shout, “No!” 

But then she remembered how the third time was so often the charm in all the stories she’d heard, and agreed to give the shrimp a share of the intestines in exchange for the old woman’s name. 

Alas, the shrimp was also a grifter and skulked off as soon as it got what it wanted, leaving the girl in utter despair. There was just a shred of intestines left, a mere scrap. The old woman would kill her, she was sure of it. She might as well throw herself in the river and get it over with. Thinking these dire thoughts, she noticed something out of the corner of her eye—a crab—walking sideways toward her out of the water.

“Hey, whadda ya got there?” said the crab. “Mmm! Are those bloody intestines? Give me a bite.”

“A bite is all I have,” said the poor girl. “I’m doomed. You may as well have it. But first I have to ask, if I give this last scrap to you, will you tell me the old witch’s name?”

“Sure,” the crab responded casually, as if the girl’s life wasn’t at stake. “But you have to promise not to tell her I told you so she doesn’t kill me.” 

“Okay,” she agreed.

After being betrayed three times, she didn’t believe him, but with nothing left to lose, she tossed the last scrap toward the crab who caught it in his claw and started scuttling back into the water. 

Just as the girl was about to surrender all hope, the crab stopped and gave her what she wanted: “Her name is In A Storm Coffin On Your Back!” then disappeared under the water with the last scrap.

The girl leaped up and ran back to the cabin. When she burst through the door like an invader instead of a slave, the startled witch looked up from her savory bowl of rice and beans. 

“What’s this? Where’s my intestines?” she demanded.

“I know your name!” the girl shouted in triumph. And before the old witch could do anything to stop her, she hollered so loud the whole mountain heard:

“In A Storm Coffin On Your Back!”

The spell that bound her to the witch broke. She was free.

The witch howled with rage, for it was true, her name was In A Storm Coffin On Your Back.

“Who told you my name?” she screeched.

“I’ll never tell,” the girl said, confident now that she was free.

Foaming at the mouth, the witch pieced it together. “It must have been someone at the stream! I’ll make them pay.” Grabbing her machete off the wall, she stormed out of the cottage toward the river, yelling the whole way.

“Traitor! I’m coming for you! You’re dead meat!”

The girl sat down and enjoyed, at last, a huge bowl of rice and beans.

When the witch reached the river she railed at the eel who popped his head up to investigate the commotion.

“You slimy bastard, did you tell that girl my name?”

“Wasn’t me,” said the eel, slinking quickly away.

Next came the fish, stuffed from his meal of turkey intestines.

“It was you! Confess or die!” the witch shrieked.

“Not I!” insisted the fish, darting away upstream.

The same routine went down with the shrimp. No one would own up to giving her name away. The witch was beside herself. She was so furious smoke poured out of her ears, her brains were close to boiling.

Frothing at the stream’s edge, she glimpsed another creature coming toward her—the crab. The old woman glowered and gave the real stink-eye to the wary crustacean, half-in, half-out of the water, ready to disappear if things got dangerous.

“Did you tell the girl my name?” she growled.

This was the moment the crab had been waiting for.

“I did! It was me!” he shouted in jubilation.

“I’ll kill you!” she lunged toward him with the machete, but the crab just backed up a few inches and laughed, which enraged her even more. 

“Bahahahaha! You’ll kill me? Yeah, right! Just try it, old witch. See if you can get me!”

The crab taunted her, moved sideways a few inches more, till most of his shell was covered by the stream. All she could see was his eyes jutting above the surface mocking her.

Enraged, the witch strode into the water. “I’ll kill you!”

“Come get me!” 

Back and forth they went, the crab moving steadily sideways into deeper and deeper water.

“You crusty wretch, I’ll pluck your eyes out and suck out your innards!” she threatened, slashing the water, so sure of herself she didn’t notice the water was over her head— until, with one great stride, intent on stomping the little crab’s life out, her foot came down on nothing, there was no bottom, and the rest of her followed that foot down.

When the thrashing was over, she sank to the bottom, which finally appeared. The crab feasted, pulling her gizzard-fattened flesh from her bones while the water gurgled with laughter all around him.

The crab says come closer, come closer!

Better watch out witch

Your fire can’t stand up

to that sideways scuttler,

magician of air and water

at home in the mud.

Glug, glug, glug

are the old witch’s last words.

Betrayal is a bitch.

Who ended up with that big bowl of rice and beans?

Sometimes only the good don’t die young.

Photo by Francesco Ungaro on Unsplash

What do you think of the old witch’s name, In A Storm Coffin On Her Back? I was puzzled when I heard it. In fact, I didn’t really get it until I recorded the story here for you and felt the witch’s rage rising in me like a hurricane. It’s that rage that leads to her death, a death she carried on her own back. Yes, it was a burden, but she was not a slave. She could have thrown it off whenever she wanted. What would her name have been if she chose that?

This is a Haitian story, most likely with roots in Africa. I couldn’t find anything about it aside from what’s told in the story as I heard it from Jay. My interpretation is psychological and may have nothing to do with its original meaning, but I think it’s fair to say that this story has something to say about how one’s anger can become one’s death, a living death even. I imagine that witch might have been lonely. It also has something to say about the magic of liminal spaces and about not giving up. The crab moves with ease between air and water, conversing with witch and girl. The girl, knowing she will likely die, gives her last scrap of meat to the crab. Anything can happen at the edge of water. You never know.

I do recommend knowing the historical context of stories. Often, stories mean far different things in the cultures where they originated, and I think it’s good manners to respect those original meanings, especially in this time when we are reckoning with the ongoing aftershocks of colonialism. Cultural appropriation is not appropriate. It’s actually offensive and something I worry about as a storyteller. I make mistakes, but I do my best to listen if a story is giving me permission to share it. In the case of Piko, I made an altar for each of the stories I shared, feeding them with prayers and beauty, and while I’m unfortunately not clairaudient, as in hearing voices that sound distinct from the one inside my own head, I do feel I was given permission by these particular stories to share them, and to reflect on them in a way that is relevant for modern citizens of cultures in dire need of their deltas of wisdom.

Just because a story means something in one time and place, doesn’t mean its historical meaning is more valid than what it means to you as someone who hears it today. Treated with respect, which sometimes must include acts of reparation in the material world like acknowledging sources or donating money to causes valued by the original tellers, stories will become guides more often than not (some stories may not ever leave their place and should not be forced to), because that is why stories exist. You could even say it’s their destiny.

Stories are here as river guides on the infinite tributaries of life, able to help us over rapids, and to free us from whirlpools. They pull us off the banks into the sweeping current in the middle river. They soothe us at the bends. And, no matter what you think about time, they always deliver us to the same place, the vast ocean where all kinds of water forgets they were ever divided. The place where cloud, raindrop, river, and stream are one. They also suck us down and drown us when it’s needed, but in the end they do their best to save us. Stories are mouth-to-ear resuscitation.

And stories are migrating. I witnessed that when the waters of the Pu’uhonua received my stories from cultures worldwide, and the little world around the ponds responded, rippling out to affect my life up the mountain, and even into my dreams. The times they are a-changin’. You can never step in the same river twice.

If you’ve made it this far, you may be thinking, all these words came from one little story about a crab?

My hope is that you’d be saying that with delight and awe, not exasperation, but as I said, my personal work now, is not to care what you think. It’s to tell the truth in the best way I can do it, which is slant as Emily Dickinson would say, hopefully with a measure of delight that stimulates your own ability to leap from stone to stone without slipping in the stream, or as E.M. Forster said at the end of Howard’s End: “Only connect!” which I doubt many people read anymore, which doesn’t reduce its value in the least. Remember that, readers, even if you don’t read Late Victorian novels or Emily Dickinson like I do, don’t stop those leaps. Let them rip and follow them where they guide you, for as Robert Bly noted in his book Leaping Poetry, the leap is where joy lives. So yes, all these words from one little story about a witch and a crab. That’s a wonder, isn’t it, how imagination flows when given a channel to receive it?

How will you channel this story? I want to know.

And because my mind leaped back in time in the writing of this essay to that first turn of the clock radio dial where time for me became forever associated with the band Styx, who at the time I had no idea was also the name of a river in the Greek Underworld by which the ancients swore implacable oaths, I will honor my delight in making these connections and the joy I still feel when I hear “Come Sail Away,” which some may say is a somewhat cheesy song, by ending this spiraling typhoon of an essay with a few last lyrics and a link:

A gathering of angels
Appeared above my head
They sang to me this song of hope
And this is what they said

They said come sail away, come sail away
Come sail away with me, lads
Come sail away, come sail away
Come sail away with me

Links to earlier essays in this “To Live in Growing Orbits” series:

To Live in Growing Orbits, Vol. I: Nanaue the Shark Man

To Live in Growing Orbits, Vol. II: Shark Medicine

Resources:

Cosmic Owl Newsletter by Louise Edington

The Crane Bag Podcast by Jay Leeming

“Come Sail Away,” by Styx, off the album The Grand Illusion, A & M Records, 1977

Leaping Poetry: An Idea with Poems and Translation, by Robert Bly, University of Pittstburgh Press.

Piko: A Return to the Dreaming, by Jennifer Lighty, Whaleroad Press, 2023.

Thank you so much for reading The Corpus Callosum Chronicles. I’m going to happily assume if you made it this far you appreciate how I tell a story, and find enjoyment here in these words. I’d love to hear what else you find! Please reach out any time by sending me a direct message or replying to this post. If you are able to support my work financially, I would be so grateful if you’d consider a paid subscription. Here’s a link and please share the word if you love these words:

Kō aloha lā ea

Concentrate on love by way of the light