Saltmarsh Journals

Physical shapes hold memories, something I quite firmly believe in, a visceral truth. I took this photo on a journey to the west coast in between high school and college. I thought of it then as a phenomenal photo op, nothing more, but today I see things differently.

On that same journey I drove my little car through a hole carved in a redwood tree, a tree so tall I could not see the top of it as I approached it and drove through. Further up the coast, I visited an ancient grove and leaned against a tree estimated to have been a seedling when Columbus first visited this vast continent. All those years standing in one place. Siddhartha move over, this tree has a lot of years on you…

Years later I walked on a different beach and came upon an elderly woman sitting alone on a rock, bent over her cane a bit, gazing out to sea. I nodded and walked on, leaving her to her own thoughts. In the distance, I noticed another bent over human form walking down the beach, her partner, I figured. Perhaps better able to walk on the fickle sands than she…

I watched the ocean caressing the shore, wave after relentless wave, the tide receding, leaving tidal pools and the detritus of sea life behind: dead crabs, seaweed, sea glass, shells, driftwood…

Then I sat upon a rock, appreciating its solid form after tiring of the shifting sands. I wondered what that rock had seen, who else had sat upon it, how long it had been there, how it got there…

Today I think of all these things and they congeal into one thought. Older cultures held, perhaps still hold, this same thought. All of creation holds life, holds memories. Stone holds memories the longest, and through various transformations, so do sand and soil, and hence everything that draws life from the earth.

I sit here today, a chef, remembering the smells, sights, and tactile essence of my grandmother’s kitchen. I pick up a knife, a fish, and a cooking pot, and my cells know instinctively what to do with them, how to combine food, herbs, tools and memories to create a magnificent meal.

It’s like they say about riding a bicycle, one never forgets…but it’s more. My grandmother’s memories reside in me as well, I have felt their presence my entire life.

If I were to, instead of driving my car through a tree, carve a home in that 500 year-old tree, or live in a treehouse in its branches, or cut it down and make my home from lumber from its vast bulk, what wondrous memories would meld with my consciousness?

Getting up from my rock and retracing my path back down the beach, I came upon the elderly couple walking together towards their car. He held her left hand in the crook of his arm and she leaned heavily on both him and her cane as they slowly left the beach.

I stood still so as to be able to watch them, noticing how closely their bent forms resembled each other. They didn’t speak to each other, focused as they were on making their way the few steps they had come from their car. They seemed as one, shaped by the same lifetime spent together, the same memories.

I turned for one last look at the ocean. The ocean, mother to us all, shaping and transforming the life within it, from plankton to the whales that feed upon it…carving the shoreline, nurturing life, giving birth and depositing the dead on the shore to feed shore life…what memories reside there, the waters that have existed since the beginning of time…

As I write these words today, the photo of the ocean, rock, and sand comes to mind. I am as the shore and rock, seemingly solid, shaping my world with my memories, thoughts, ideas, and plans, and yet being shaped by the wind, sun, water, other people, and collective memories.

Content in my being, absorbed as it were in being me, yet waiting to be filled by someone, she to whom I will lend my shape, at the same time as she shapes me. Together sharing our knowledge and memories, expressing our selves within love…