maggie and milly and molly and may
went down to the beach (to play one day)
and maggie discovered a shell that sang
so sweetly she couldn’t remember her troubles,and
milly befriended a stranded star
whose rays five languid fingers were;
and molly was chased by a horrible thing
which raced sideways while blowing bubbles:and
may came home with a smooth round stone
as small as a world and as large as alone.
For whatever we lose(like a you or a me)
it’s always ourselves we find in the sea
There is so much to say about this poem and how it applies to the sleepy awakening of interest in the other that comes from our first awareness of nature. Even though we are surrounded by people, I’m fairly sure we begin life uncertain whether or not they are really only aspects of ourselves. This isn’t really so surprising since we start out our existence as a piece of someone else. It takes a while to be sure of boundaries and territories.
From day one though, we know the butterfly in the garden is not ourselves, and the bubble-blowing crab that chases us at the beach is “other”. This is an essential fact of our awakening lives. The natural world is impervious to our cries and resists our powerful language, and this makes it “outside”, “other” and “in relation to”. This means that every hour we spend watching bugs in the grass or birds in their nests or (beavers building dams), we are confronting the murky edges of self, the limits of what we control and influence, and the monumental and heartbreaking awareness of our own “finite-ness”; of our own death.
We do not go on forever. We cannot control everything. We are a piece of the world but not all of it. These are hard lessons that our parents alone cannot possibly teach us.The natural world can.
I was thinking about this last week when I heard of a concept being developed for a summer program centered around the estuaries and tailored for children on the “spectrum” of autism and asperger’s disorder. The idea is to gradually focus the child’s interest in the relationships of living things, and to link that awareness to a greater sense of community. Of course I thought about the way these particular beavers in this particular watershed helped me find so much of my own voice, and made me aware of so much I had never heard or thought. I thought about them being a part of Martinez’ estuary, and soundly confronting the “autistic” view of the council, who seemingly had absolutely no expectation or awareness of the enormous public response their actions would generate.The beavers introduced me to people I would never have met, and I dare say they introduced the council to a host of people they might rather have never met. I’m thinking Alhambra creek has helped treat our autism, but Martinez still has a ways to go.
For whatever we lose(like a you or a me)
it’s always ourselves we find in the sea
