The strange pull of what you truly love.

            The ocean is calling, its salty fog whispers twining around my wrists, my ankle, my mind. I could stay here in the redwoods, these towering elders that watch over me while I sleep; but the fog tendrils tug and I imagine I can hear the waves breathing in and out on the shore. I grab my helmet and a scarf for the wind chill, my bike lock key and cell phone, a couple of dollars for the bus back and my swim suit.

            Downhill. Calves tight over my pedals, I lean into each curve and only brake as much as I need to. Pretending I’m on a racehorse, or a motorcycle, or maybe I’m flying – I whoop with the joy and the redwood mist gently soaks up the echo as I speed closer and closer to the coast. I am birthed out of the forest onto a panorama that steals the breath of locals and tourists alike when it’s stripped of its blanket of marine layer precipitation: Monterey Bay and the Pacific Ocean. Today, the marine layer coats my cheek like a wet exhale, and I grin anyway, cherishing my experience of this place when the fair-weather visitors deem it too gray and gloomy to blow their money on.

            Still downhill, yet more cautiously as I pedal alongside traffic and cross busy intersections, avoiding potholes and pedestrians, the elders replaced with oaks and invasive eucalyptus. Over the railroad tracks, past one of the natural food stores and a couple of taquerias, and I’m there. The Pacific Ocean as manifested by Monterey Bay lies open-armed in front of me, the fog so dense that there’s no way to even guess the city of Monterey bustles directly across the bay. Kelp and sea grass cover the beach I look down on from a coastal cliff. The surfers are dancing the waves just a cove or two over, and an older man watching his dog romp in the sand is the only other person near the water.

            I trot down the stairs and kick off my sandals to be greeted by cold, grainy sand under my feet. Shivering without from the chill and within from anticipation, I strip down to my suit. No matter how many times I find myself here, I can never rush into the water I long for without pausing. Feet firmly planted, arms at my sides or raised to the sky: a moment of thanks, of gratitude, that the ocean is always ready to catch me in expansive arms, that all I have to do is take the plunge and I will be held by a presence as deep as the night sky and no less comforting in its magnitude.

            I breathe once more, fog above me and water before me, grin once more, and run into the waves.

Let yourself be silently drawn

by the strange pull

of what you truly love.

It will not lead you astray.

- Rumi

A short tableau of summers past.

The smell of sunscreen mixed with citronella: perpetual summer. Sitting on the guard stand, the idyllic teenage summer job - get a tan and get paid! Friends and annoying little kids abound, whistles and straw hats, and if you forget your water bottle I'll hand you a red plastic cup with a healthy dose of shame. Snarf lunch on a twenty-minute break, or if you're lucky an off-duty guard will run to Safeway for sandwiches or sushi.

So much encapsulated above the blue chlorine water and below the blue hot sky.

Pulling tarps as the sun rises, quiet in the early morning. Old ladies wait to do an exercise routine recorded over a tape of Kenny Rogers songs. Trees and birds watch the cycle of the day go by as parkas are peeled off, the old ladies leave, and chipmunk chatterers of children arrive to jump or be dragged into the pool for a half hour of heaven or hell.

Pulling tarps as the sun sets, tired sunned-out skin, lithe happy bodies, high school idealistic chatter: "What's everyone doing tonight?" The never-ending search for thrills on vacation in a small hometown.

The Holdfast

I live in a home in the redwoods.

Mushrooms blossom after each rain.

But today is not a mushroom day.

The ocean is calling, its salty fog whispers twining around my wrists, my ankle, my mind.

Ahh. Heartbeat of my soul, the breathing of waves in and out.

Sometimes things die.

Sometimes we help them die.

We think it’s just a straw.

If a million of us think that, a million straws settle in the belly of the ocean.

One day, we might be thirsty

and find nothing to suck up our straws.

The part of kelp that anchors it to the ocean floor is called a holdfast.

Let us hold fast to the earth. If we forget our holdfasts,

we might drift in an ocean of straws

forever.

The ocean makes me feel expansive, infinite, philosophical.

Stinging nettle patches, up the road from the ocean, make me feel hungry!

Stinging nettle is one of the most nutritious plants native to North America.

Full of minerals and vitamins, its stinging barbs release

neurotoxins that act like

Icy-Hot

on stiff muscles and arthritic joints.

It’s also very tasty!

(Like spinach on steroids.)

Blanch, boil, or dry the leaves.

Make nettle tea, which can also be used as a conditioning hair rinse.

Blanched leaves blended with

olive oil

pine nuts

garlic

and parmesan

make an incredible, wild-harvested pesto!

“Hope means to keep on living amid desperation and to keep humming in the darkness.”

- Henri M. Nouwen

Keep humming, keep harvesting, keep running to hug the ocean.

Her arms are open. The redwoods keep breathing.

The earth waits to embrace you.

The smiles linger in my mind, the sweetness lingers on my tongue.

I balanced on the chipping white paint metal of the volunteer house's back porch. Gnawing. Twisting. Jawing on a stick of sugarcane Betty had given me. If everyone had to work this hard to get sweetness in their mouths, obesity would be a flying-pig, laughable myth. Finally I worked a section away from the center, my teeth prying the treasure open and chomping down to release the juice. Mmm. I wouldn't say heaven, but it was close. Watery enough to be refreshing; sweet enough to be, well, sweet. Candy water, just shy of syrup on the tongue.


No wonder all those brown teeth gleam dully out of all those mouths, the school children waving "Hello, mzungu!" as I the white person ride my privilege on the back of a motorcycle taxi. If sugarcane were my after-school snack, cheap as it is, I would set to work chewing it open too. Their bodies stay fit - not enough calories to weigh them down - but their teeth fade from white to yellow ivory before resigning into splotches of rich brown and tan. Even toddlers, even Kymbi who has a leg up on life in Uganda because Betty works for a couple of mzungus, even he is blooming tiny brown blossoms on his two-year-old teeth.


I see these smiles and ache. We high-falutin' Westerners have the audacity to imagine we can "help" these people, by bringing them railroads and English and Jesus and chemicals. We can't even bring them toothbrushes. Or maybe they don't care, and that's my Western fallacy, imposing my paradigm of "teeth-need-to-be-clean-and-people-should-live-to-be-100" on another culture.


The bulk aisle. I stare at the five different brands of packaged raw cane sugar, not to mention all of the other kinds of cane sugar. All those brown tooth smiles, those small hands grasping chunks of sweetness. All these privileged or not-so-privileged, grasping at chunks of sweetness in canes, Cokes, petit fours, you  name it. Is sugar the Pandora's box of our bodies? We know not what we wish for. Our ancestors celebrated bitter as embodying life-giving nutrients. But we lean in, sugar bedazzled, and lift the lid.

Wise words echo from Tamarack Lake at sunrise.

"Above all, stay grounded. Remember that there is earth for your roots and sun for your leaves. All you have to do is reach down, stretch up, and breathe deeply."

The middle of the wilderness is such a simple place from which to feel certain. The struggle, I find, is to bring the certainty of those wild places into my tick-tock clock-based paycheck routine. To reach up out of everydayness into the visions of something more.

Reach down, into where you come from. Stretch up, to where you know you can be. And breathe deeply, knowing that to breathe is enough.

Taking my own wisdom to heart as I inch towards the river of writing that I long to jump in. Applications to science writing programs in the midst of work is a little like someone asking you, "What is the meaning of your life?" every ten minutes. A practice in groundedness, to be sure.

Having a heart, no matter where you are, at once takes courage and no effort at all.

"Ask yourself, and yourself alone, one question. Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good; if it doesn't, the path is of no use." ~ Carlos Castaneda

My path has a heart, even if it doesn't have a clear destination at this point in time. I find myself devouring stories of pursuing one's passions despite everything, and clinging to the words of the wise in the hope that they might apply to me.

"To find our calling is to find the intersection between our own deep gladness and the world's deep hunger."

~ Frederick Buechner

I find deep gladness in words, but could writing really be what the world hungers for? I run back and forth along the trajectory of a writer, searching for that place where it meets the world's deep hunger, poverty, despair, injustice.

"Why do you never find anything written about that idiosyncratic thought you avert to, about your fascination with something no one else understands? Because it is up to you."

~ Annie Dillard

Perhaps I am searching in vain for that place where writing mingles with social and environmental justice, personal and environmental wellbeing, to the extent that I want it to. Because it is up to me. I can read nature philosophy and sustainable op-eds all my life long and admire how they manage to blend science and literature. Or I can bravely step out into the stream myself; take a deep breath, and share my story.

My thesis is finished, but Suubi will always be in my life, if only in my heart.

Here is the link to the culmination of my time in Uganda and three months spent thinking, researching, and writing back in California. By no means is it perfect or all-encompassing, but I gave it my all.

My senior thesis in Environmental Studies at UC Santa Cruz.