Stripping down to the bone

Or, how to straddle two worlds

Photo by the author

Hey there everyone —

This past weekend I went to the Oregon Coast. That’s what they call it out here, “the coast.” Where I grew up, in Virginia, we called it “the ocean.” It’s funny how these small phrases signal collective priorities. When I went to the ocean as a kid—Rehoboth Beach, Virginia Beach—there were wooden boardwalks with stands selling hot dogs and cotton candy, stores full of boogie boards, oversized T shirts, and tiny glass bottles filled with sand, with a fingernail sized cork in the top and the name of the beach in cursive across the side.

At the edge of the boardwalk there were cement stairs down to the beach. If the sand wasn’t too hot for your bare feet, you could walk through the umbrellas and the lounge chairs and the portable radio with tinny bass beats creating a sonic circumference around the couple drinking beers, to give them the illusion there was space between them and the kids pushing wet sand into yellow and red plastic castle molds and building a moat with a stick. You could walk to the ocean and stick your feet in it, let the cold water chill your ankles and hope the surf would be so loud that if you looked straight ahead, you could pretend you were alone. Then you’d get hit with a stray inflatable ball, tossed from a volleyball game being played in the surf.

Almost the entire coastline of Oregon is protected—it’s state or national parks—and the only place you can buy something is in one of the small towns in between. The beach backs up into dunes, and behind the dunes are high stone cliffs. When you look up at the top of the cliffs, the trees look bent in the wind, even when it’s still, because the wind has thinned out their branches and forced them to grow at an angle. If you’re lucky, you might see a bald eagle at the top of the tallest tree, scanning the water for prey.

You can come to an Oregon beach in winter and see one or two dogs running and one person walking ahead of you and that’s it. If the person is far enough ahead and there’s wind kicking the sand in twisting clouds in front of you, it can blot the person out entirely. The borders between the water and the sand and the horizon blur and your steps sink soundlessly and you’re just moving, floating through space, because you can’t see the end of the beach in front of you or the place where you started walking, because it’s all one. I think that’s why they call it the coast. It’s not a boardwalk and a bunch of people being entertained and the ocean, down there, the thing you paid to visit. It’s a totality that’s swallowed you, accepted you, dispensed with you, all at once.

I went to the ocean to close out the year and take stock. There are lots of models for year-end reflection, but the one I like best is from Leo Babauta, who created a practice he calls Sacred Bow (bow like bow down, not bow like shoot a bow and arrow). Leo writes Zen Habits, so his process is both a Zen ceremony and a set of habits you’ll create. Imagine a person doing what it might take to honor the past—to bow in thanks and in deep awareness of what was—and then supplicate with presence and gratitude before what is coming.

The day before I started Scared Bow, though, I was reading The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible by Charles Eisenstein. I didn’t get very far but I hope I can finish it this January. In the beginning of the book he talks about what he calls The Story of People, a way of narrating time, history, purpose, and individualism that shaped the West’s idea of itself as an exceptional civilization, rooted in reason and science. That Story has been breaking apart, as far back as World War I, he writes, leaving people today at once longing for the Story to shore itself up, and at the same time wishing it would just splinter and collapse and let whatever is supposed to be coming show up.

Eisenstein’s book was published in 2013 which means it was written in 2010, and I can feel as I read it how much more intense the dynamic he described then has become now. I don’t have to tell you what it feels like to endure the frantic and violent and abusive efforts to shore up this Story, the way a grieving person shakes the body of their beloved who has just died. It’s fruitless and cataclysmic and doomed and yet has to shudder and smoke and hiss until it’s gone. I can feel the Story in me, the way it runs me, makes me think my body is a machine and my mind a computer and my heart a pump and my being here is necessary because I’m a cog in the perpetuation of an idea and so I’m needed, the sacrifice is worth it, part of the Story of People.

Reflecting on Eisenstein’s argument and how it feels now, I think we are the People of the Gap. Or the People Between Two Worlds. People standing on what looks like firm ground, watching a chasm open between our feet. It’s all very well to know this, but it begs the question of what to “do” and how to “be” in such a contingent world. What does it mean to set an intention for a New Year, or to establish a series of priorities, when to do so is to behave as if the Story that needs to die is going to live on?

So that’s where my mind was as I waited til dark, when my wife and I had agreed to start our Sacred Bow. We took a bundle of firewood out to the beach. We dug a pit in the sand and stacked wood. It caught. In the red light of a headlamp, we pulled out our sheets of paper and our pens and started reading Leo’s questions.

I heard the roar of the waves and watched the clouds backlit by the new moon. The wind blew gusts of sparks from the fire across the sand. I felt: There is only fire, water, air, and earth.

Then my mind kicked in: I don’t know if it’s insanity or hubris, naming my future as if I can bring it into being, alone, through force of will. Every goal I set brings me out of attunement with the physical world and into the hallucination of my own consciousness. Every box I check on my to do list draws me out of how I want to feel as I move through my days. I cannot wrestle myself out of this state of being with my mind. I have to drop through the floor and into the darkness.

I want to love the Gap, instead of fearing it or trying to manage it. I want to be able to accept that I am living my life here, in this crucible of violent thrashing and beautiful longing, and stop pretending I know what’s going to happen, that what’s coming is annihilation or exaltation.

The ocean is a good teacher. In the morning, my clothes smelling of woodsmoke, I look out at what looks like the same beach, the same dull muted landscape. I walk the same path. The two enormous red trees that looked permanently lodged in the sand the day before have been rearranged; they’re in a completely different orientation. The sand beneath my feet, soft and warm, is also breaking apart the cliffs in the wind—protection and destruction in the same moment.

I want to end this reflection with an instruction: to you, to myself. I’m supposed to give you a call to action, a practice, a strategy to better manage your time. I’m supposed to give you something tangible, a talisman you can wear around your neck and hold in your hand when the ground drops away and gravity can’t hold you down. I want to stop looking at the ground and grab your hand, feel the air in which we’re all flying.

Stay safe our there this week —

xo

Rebecca