I wake up with an urgency inside me. I have energy boiling in my veins and a gravitational pull demanding my attention. I know this ache, it arrives with a rumble and subtle threat of eruption. It then surges me toward an impulse of freedom when I’ve been steeping in my own civility for too long. It stokes a need to run, to throw off the lines to shore, to move with what is throttling my insides, ready to launch into a roar. And when I don’t unleash it, it becomes destructive. Quick to ignite, turned inward and towards those closest to me.
I live close to this fiery, beastly hunger. She is a treasured, intimate companion. And I am forever learning how to meet her, both in the inner and the outer. She was with me while I slept last night and I woke this morning knowing where I needed to go.
I head out to hike my favorite valley. A place I feel deeply at home within, for reasons too precious to my heart to share. Even with all its more recent rules and regulations because of heavy use and a need for cultural preservation, I always return here because I know this valley will hold me. And because I cherish a place that demands your descent first, and leaves the harder work of making your way up and out for the end.
I start the hike down, feeling restricted by my shoes, but knowing I want to move fast and if I take them off, the muscles in my feet are not primed for this terrain and I’ll likely sprain something or rip a toenail. Injuries I’m almost willing to risk for how caged I currently feel in my clothing, but can feel my future self shaking her head no and heed that refusal while quietly swearing at my humanness.
I hurry down the trail, familiar with rocks and steps, my feet greeting the drop they’ve done many times. When I get to the beach, the ocean is roaring in a way that immediately starts to soothe me. The wind is defiant and unleashed over the island, ripping off hats, tangling hair, and causing fellow hikers to shield themselves, gasp, and sway.
I walk out onto the beach and there is a young woman moving rocks to write something in the sand so she can take a picture with it. I want to destroy it.
I don’t of course, but I do get down on all fours, crawling across the beach and rocks like the animal inside me. I get several confused stares and probably a few laughs, and I keep my growl to a low rumble, drowned out by the sea.
The beach is full of tourists today, wafting their scent of sunscreen down into the valley, scents that feel at odds with the salt in the air and the putrid smell of rotting leaves and strawberry guava on the path.
I allow for a deeper growl as I head into the woods behind the beach and perch myself on a fallen tree in the forest. And I let myself taste the full bitterness of disdain for a moment. The place that could otherwise slide toward human righteousness around how people behave in nature. Today it’s sickly sweet, like a second cup of ayahuasca after you’ve already emptied your insides. I cough it up like a cat and sit my ass back on the ground, leaning back on the tree on which I was perched. I sit there for a long while, letting the intensity of the wind and the sound of the sea swallow up the rest of the cluster of earthquakes inside me.
I finally open my eyes and watch the chaos of the rip currents collide, the waves unpredictable in their cresting.
Something in my sacral feels a pull to march myself in and let my body be humbled by a force more powerful. I can see myself wading and then swimming into the waves, dragged out further and under by the current. I let my imagination be as visceral as I need it to be, the cold, the drag, the breathlessness, the surrender. And at that, my animal finally relaxes. I laugh at myself and the drama of it, of needing something as big as the ocean to settle me.
I check in with my creature to see if there’s more she needs. She’s peaceful for now, licking her paws covered in salt and sand.
I breathe out then and realize that what I’ve actually come here for, is to pray. The sea is loud enough for me to actually hear myself, drowning out the storms of the world, of crisis, of war, of all the movements of life’s decisions, big and small.
And I remember what a lover this island has been for me. In the way that lovemaking can tire out all the external din, bring you into the blinding immediacy of the present moment, and return you to your deepest self, renewed and sated.
I love this part of me that runs to the sea and back to the land because she knows what she needs and how to find her way back to what is holy and true.
It is often the mother who comes to me in these moments, a presence of grace that is the kind of beauty that stops the battle within. My little restless crazed creature somehow always knows how to find her way back to her, clawing her way through my body, back to the divine.
I pray for myself and I pray for this world. The ocean takes it.
And I pray that there are other hearts on other shorelines doing the same.
At home in their longing, feral in their bodies, and calling for a world both here and not yet born.
I head back, feeling quiet and clear. On my way up, I smile and say hi to the people making their way on the trail. I stop and chat with two older women visiting from Oklahoma, helping each other down, holding hands and hiking poles. I pass 2 pregnant women, likely on their “babymoons”, all with that second trimester glow. And back at my car, I find that I parked by a mile marker sign that has had part of the E scratched off so that it says MILF.
Down the road I stop to visit a solitary horse, whose presence gifts me a moment of tender stillness. She’s pressed up against her fence and I offer her a rose that I brought with me to give to the valley but forgot in the car. She takes it with almost astonishing gentleness in her teeth and drops it on the ground at her feet. It’s a moment so pure I almost wish someone else were with me to witness it, as if that would make it more real than when it is just me. But there already is someone else here.
I thank her and promise to bring her an apple the next time I come by.
Knowing that for all my days, I will need to feed the beast. And I will keep making offerings to the Mother.
