ocean in the veins

the birth of the sea, mother rage, and blurry horizons

I started reading Rachel Carson’s epic 1951 book The Sea Around Us last night, aloud, to my daughter. It is one of the hundreds of hardcovered books that line the built-in wooden shelves of this cottage in Maine, which my grandparents bought in 1968, and which holds so much of my family’s life force.

The book begins at a beginning so ancient most of us never consider it. Where did the ocean come from? How was it born, how did it grow? Carson guides us back 2.5 billion years, to “the new earth, freshly torn from its parent sun,” and sings up a science-grounded creation myth so beautiful it tugs at the bones, which, she points out, “are a heritage from the calcium-rich ocean of Cambrian time.”

As I write, the ocean is a sheen of pewter out to a horizon that blurs at its pale transition into hazy gray sky.

An image and a feeling.

Sometimes, you can hardly tell where one thing ends and another begins.

As I write, the House of Representatives has just passed a budget reconciliation bill— despite House Minority leader Jeffries breaking the record for the longest floor speech, over 8 hours in protest—despite Pennsylvania Republican Brian Fitzpatrick flipping to vote “no” after hundreds of his constituents staged a “die in” outside his office. You know what’s in the bill. Slashes to funding for Medicaid and SNAP, trillions added to the debt to fund fucking ICE and military spending and tax cuts for the wealthy—a bill so blatantly hell-bent on doubling down on cruelty that it literally means taking food from hungry children and stripping funding from clean energy.

Why?

To buy more death.

Call it what it is. Cynical pain-worshipping violent supremacy. As if life is a game, he who rips the most wealth out the fastest and crams it in his own pockets wins. Bonus points if it hurts other people.

I keep believing that our bodies know a different story.

Deep down, we know.

“Each of us carries in our veins a salty stream in which the elements sodium, potassium, and calcium are combined in almost the same proportions as in sea water. This is our inheritance from the day, untold millions of years ago, when a remote ancestor, having progressed from the one-celled to the many-celled stage, first developed a circulatory system in which the fluid was merely the water of the sea.”

—Rachel Carson

The ocean is our blood.

The earth is our body.

This is not a metaphor.

In this small seaside tourist town, there are banners up alongside the main road. Each one honors a local war veteran. Black and white photos of white men, framed in red-white-and-blue.

The other day, driving past them, my blood got warm with rage. Why the fuck do we honor the men who fought in wars? I suddenly thought. Why not photos of the teachers. Photos of the mothers who were raising children during those same wars. Photos of the farmers who were growing the food.

I have nothing against the individual men, surely doing their best in the circumstances of their time. But need we honor only men, only war?

Sing me up the songs of the mothers dripping sweat from elbow crooks, hot baby flesh pressed to chest, nursing the future. Sing me the songs of the men who mended sweaters and kept the horses curried. Sing me the songs of the life-makers.

Sometimes I let myself dream it into existence: the world as it could be. It is already here, in glimmers and in pockets, in co-ops and song circles, in the hearts of those who practice gentleness with one another.

In that world, the banners lining the road would honor peace.

At the Farmers Market this morning I had a knot in my stomach. A guitarist strummed and sang under a little white tent. The heirloom tomatoes gleamed. Garlic scapes twirled in bunches. There was the usual long line at the pretzel baker’s stand. I was torn between wanting to bow down in gratitude to all the farmers still tending their crops in the summer heat, to the singer and the basket-carrying neighbors, all of us trying to feed our families and find a way to go on—and wanting to open up my throat and scream.

How dare we go on, how dare we all not just stop and lie down like the constituents in Middle Township, tombstones on our chests, scream at the heavens?

In the car, I turned on Alexandra Blakely’s album Wails: Songs for Grief.

Nothing ever stays the same, she sings. Everything is change, everything is change.

“There were tides in the new earth, long before there was an ocean,” writes Carson. “In response to the pull of the sun the molten liquids of the earth’s whole surface rose in tides that rolled unhindered around the globe.”

The soupy slosh of it all. We were born from spin, from movement, from whiplash. Nothing ever stays the same. At some point, one theory goes, “a great wave was torn away and hurled into space,” and this—this is how the moon was born.

A scar in the Pacific ocean tells the story. Evidence of something torn away.

The moon, whose nearly perfect half-circle perched outside my window last night draping beams across my chest in bed, was once the body of the earth too.

No wonder we look at it with longing. Once, you were a part of me.

I spent most of the day mothering. Three loads of laundry, farmer’s market, grocery store. Helping my daughter bake Viennese Whirls, which were a stressful nightmare every step of the way. The pastry tips were too small, the dough wouldn’t come out, the time was running short, the kitchen was littered with mess. There were tears and frustration and a session of talking her down from the cliff of self-loathing and trying to undo the karma of my ancestral lineage of perfectionism and then there was lunch to make and all the dishes to wash and texts to send to coordinate play dates and a performance to go to she and her friends had put on and a tea party to plan for tomorrow and there is still laundry to fold and potted herbs to plant toppled on the lawn from the storm last night and there’s the fucking budget bill and I came home and lay down and wanted to cry.

The banners on the side of the road would say none of it matters.

Nobody’s paying me for it.

What mothers know though, know in our bones, is, once, you were a part of me.

The song in our veins says life, nurturing life? It’s all there is, really.

The story in my head still says maybe none of it matters.

I think this is why I write. Some need to prove to myself I exist. That actually, it all matters. Being alive. Holding someone in your arms while they’re crying. The songs you sing out loud in the car while crying. Telling about it. Naming what hurts and what is beautiful.

The gray has lifted.

The place where the sky meets the sea is blue now, though the actual horizon has disappeared in a blur, the way heat will ripple above the highway sometimes in the distance, and in this moment, I can’t really tell.

Where does one thing end and another begin?