Of Tears and Mar

Written by Adrianna Arosemana

Waves crash against each other in a ceaseless and chaotic rhythm that keeps the world whirling. They fight each other, love one another, tumbling tides and ideas in an eternal dance. The ocean is feared and respected and quite an enigma to man. More than eighty percent of our ocean is unmapped, unobserved, and unexplored. Much remains to be learned from exploring the mysteries of the deep.1 The ocean is chaos and order, life and death, yin and yang. The great ancient Roman Empire, which conquered more than two million square miles of land and peoples, cowered before the power and uncertainty of Neptune, god of water and sea, wind and storm.

Gary Snyder, in his essay “The World is Places,” calls us to “Revisualize that place with its smells and textures, walking through it again in your imagination, [it] has a grounding and settling effect.”2 I revel in this madness and might as my feet sink and disappear into sand and shells. The moonlight is intoxicating, reflecting off the sparkling water while a kind southeastern breeze embraces me. I can scream and sing and run freely. I am alive here. Human.

“Life consists with wildness. The most alive is the wildest. Not yet subdued to man, its presence refreshes him. One who pressed forward incessantly and never rested from his labors, who grew fast and made infinite demands on life, would always find himself in a new country or wilderness, and surrounded by the raw material of life.”3

I will always find a way back to the ocean. She beckons and seduces me, like a siren humming for her next meal. Forests will soon fall, and mountain caps will become beheaded, but no man, no technology, can ever command the currents. Her beauty is ingrained in the magic of what we have no control over. It makes existing exciting and worthwhile.

The days go on forever but my lifetime is brief. My “best” days are the onsets of my domestication. We’re primed for monotony and labor. How could you ever want this for your children? How do you expect me to want children of my own? My daughter would end up sweating her life away for your pleasures. She would spend her years producing your salt instead of relishing what the tides offer freely. We’re trapped in this dark place where we must scramble and exhaust our way through, up, out; just to breathe. We are killing our wild selves to live in today’s society, and it is heartbreaking.

Henry David Thoreau, considered the “Father of the Nature Essay,” wrote Walking in 1862, long before climate change and environmental issues were on anyone’s radar. His most famous quote declared, “In Wildness is the preservation of the world,” and I concur. Nature is healing and inspirational; it is life and death and freedom and future. Wildness is pure joy, and society lacks wildness. Civilization is losing touch with Mother Earth. It divorces itself from her instead of being in communion with her. In Thoreau’s own voice, “I believe that there is a subtle magnetism in Nature, which, if we unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright.”4 Humanity’s only chance at saving itself is through reconnection with the Earth all around us, Thoreau understood this, even in 1862: “Hope and the future for me are not in lawns and cultivated fields, not in towns and cities, but in the impervious and quaking swamps.”5

Annie Dillard, born the same year as my grandmother in 1945, is often compared to Thoreau and, like myself, is greatly inspired by him and his ideology. Dillard speaks on a division of wildness Thoreau refers to: “I might learn something of mindlessness, something of the purity of living in the physical sense and the dignity of living without bias or motive.”6 I’ve written on this idea of mindlessness before, but I often think about what life would be like if I was a housecat or a weasel, or even if I lived in the Garden of Eden. Dillard sanctions the idea, almost playing to my delusions of freewill. “We could, you know. We can live any way we want.”7 (If one did, though, one might be institutionalized.) Creatures live a simpler life, possibly riddled with higher stakes, but truly free. Maybe they don’t feel emotions, but maybe that would be easier: to only worry about living. The hardest part, depending on the individual, would be survival. As Dillard describes, “Time and events are merely poured, unremarked, and ingested directly, like blood pulsed into my gut through a jugular vein.”8 Worrying about how successful I might be in life is meaningless.

Imagine Adam and Eve never ate from the tree of knowledge. Maybe that’s how we were supposed to live; in harmony with nature and wild and free. Happy, even. Humans, as such a complicated and privileged species, worry about such inconsequential things! To be holy is to be set apart. God chose humans in his image, did he not? What sets us apart, I suppose, is the mortal illusion of free will and our choice to indulge “sinful nature”: greed, envy, pride, laziness. Ironically, what makes us “holy” is what condemns us to the flames of hell. “The weasel lives in necessity and we live in choice, hating necessity and dying at the last ignobly in its talons.”9 God certainly has a sense of humor. I’ve never heard of a weasel going to hell.

Gary Snyder, born in 1930, was an environmentalist and a writer who explored “the ways that human beings can live in harmony with the land and other living things.”10 Humanity is destroying the land and, with it, magnificence and wildness. Snyder says, “The whole earth is a great tablet holding the multiple overlaid new and ancient traces of the swirl of forces. Each place is its own place, forever (eventually) wild.”11 Although we might not see it now, the technosphere and its linear destructive paths will eventually come to an end, and nature will prevail.

Whether we prevail with mother nature, and through the mar, is up to us. Snyder also writes, “The ‘place’ gave us far-seeing eyes, the streams and breezes gave us versatile tongues and whorly ears. The land gave us a stride and the lake a dive. The amazement gave us our kind of mind. We should be thankful for that, and take nature’s stricter lessons with some grace.”12 The ocean is my place. She is who my lungs breathe for, who my soul weeps for, who my heart breaks for. I am in awe of her, and I am eternally grateful for her secrets and enlightenment g