Wild Sea and Land Creatures

This moment in history captivates and scares me in equal measure.

Walking in Taos the other day, I joined a peaceful protest against ICE and the state-sanctioned ethnic cleansing underway in the United States. While talking with one woman whose words carried hope for a safer future, I overheard someone in a different conversation say that this country is cursed because of how it began. That’s why we’re experiencing so much pain now.

I’ve often thought about the eternal round: of patterns and cycles, of time and space, of existence as we know it. A snake swallows its tail. Pain kisses the sole of pleasure. Anger and adoration are the same animal. I’ve built philosophical arguments in favor of these ideas. Across the country there are panoramic views of protest signs, rage and despair dancing around belief and conviction. The physical landscape meets the emotional landscape and the horrors of history.

In the novel, Curtains of Rain by Anel I. Flores, we meet Sol, a queer young woman in San Antonio, Texas. She is in love with Toni, a queer young nonbinary, but their love story is complicated by their families and community along the Gulf of Mexico. As Sol travels with her family back and forth to Mexico, she remembers her abuelita’s words every time they crossed together: “It was all one Mexico once, one land with a different name.”

In the face of incredible hardships the family insists the curse befell them and Sol’s queerness is to blame. They struggle with illnesses from environmental pollutants, then with opioid addiction — poisons from the America side that split the family as completely as the Gulf of Mexico split the land, leaving fragments where there had once been one.

I’ve had a vivid, recurring dream for several years. In it, I am suddenly confronted with exotic, wild creatures that captivate and scare me in equal measure. I sit looking out at a ship docked in a bay. Sea creatures drop out from a chute on the back of the ship and drop into the water, one by one. They’re brightly-colored, multi-tentacled, and whale-like in size. Glittering, bright creatures released into the water.

In another dream, I am by a body of water near a cliff. There is a paved path to the top, a steep road leading up. I’m looking out at the water, about to make my way back up when suddenly hundreds of land creatures crawl up and over the side of the cliff and pile onto the pavement. There are serpents and lizards and four-legged animals with fur; there are large insects and birds too.

What remains after these dreams is a feeling that the creatures have something to do with my creativity, my writing. They symbolized ideas and they came to me in such abundance and all at once. They demanded my full attention. Their range — from cute and adorable to terrifying and deadly, from black and gray to brightly colored, from land-bound to sea-dwelling — and their coming together like that in once place intrigued me. No matter how much I researched and thought about specific details in those dreams, they never made sense completely. Still, they stayed with me. I felt their weight.

Several years ago I came across a painting by Mayumi Oda. The painting is of a Tara or Goddess. On the ground, all around the feet of the topless Tara, animals look exotic and out of place. It was as though they were looking to her for something. I leaned forward and read the words at the bottom of the painting “Goddess Gave Names to All the Animals.”

Then it clicked: the diversity of life, the range of character — they’re symbols of the finer aspects of this existence. And they lay themselves at my feet to become part of the story. I am not the Goddess, giving names to all the animals, rather, the animating force in me — that motivates me and drives me to write — is the Goddess. And the metaphysical animals get named (identified and identified with) through story.

Somehow, this circles back to the pain of the political moment and the great injustices happening to so many among us. The idea that this is all happening because the country is cursed is a compelling one, yes. At the same time it risks enabling us to look away from the specifics of right now, as did the position of Sol’s family in Curtains of Rain, with their assertions that they were suffering addictions and illnesses because Sol was queer. The real causes and conditions — poisonous chemicals from factory jobs and access to fentanyl in the United States — are so obvious they might as well have been neon signs on the wall built to sever the two countries.

Mayumi’s painting closed that circle for me — the riddle of my recurring dream and what it was meant to show me. This was a painting that existed in the world for 34 years before I happened upon it. Somehow, this alone calms my anxieties about the misogynist, patriarchal, hetero-normative, white supremacist culture in which I’m raising my children. Maybe, with the backdrop of all of history, we can understand causes and conditions and know that we have more of those to measure our future against.

Once, when I visited the Big Island, I swam with bright fish and friendly dolphins; I wandered among vibrant rainbows and black, hardened volcanic flow — the substance made of the same base ingredients as my body, as all organic biological systems, all life — and I thought about how once, a long time ago, asteroids smashed together and made a big ball that boiled with volcanoes for millennia, burping the building blocks of life up to the surface from deep within. Volcanoes make the world’s most fertile soil, but it takes 15,000 years for that black, hard rock to turn, to become something else.

I had a conversation with my friend yesterday about time and space and how, along a linear time scale, this moment is so thin it’s barely perceptible. I know this sounds dismissive. I don’t mean it that way; it is never my intention to minimize the dangers and pain we face. I think we, like Sol, are trekking through trauma seeking triumph. So, I am writing to soothe the fiery grief and anxiety in my body.