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Tales from the Other Side of Language 103 Two shady green mountain ridges crest my drive to the Pacific Coast to land at a gray clapboard apartment on the beach. Watching the twilight on the sand with the water in constant agitation and tasting the gray, salty air coming through the window, my body and spirit begin to ease. They need this pallid quiet to sort myself out. Into the calm the next morning, the telephone’s ring sharply intrudes. My daughter is apologetic, but must tell me terrible news of the sudden death of a young friend from the Bly conferences. Heart attack. Some years ago he told an amazing story of swimming at twilight in the Gulf of Mexico near his home. He swam often there and said the water was flat and warm, silky. As he stroked through the water, a shark gently came alongside him. They swam for a long time, side by side this way, at ease with each other. He said he felt friendship, and safe; it seemed natural. After a time the shark moved slowly off. I remember my crow friend, the same ease, coming into my life. But my friend’s courage floods over me now, his willingness to step across vast difference and fear simply to swim together. His spirit is stepping into a larger vastness now. Friends in New York City are coming together for him this afternoon. I want to resonate with them somehow across the continent. But I’m still in the after-aura of the ceremony and not ready. I take a long, creamy Jacuzzi soak in the beige-tiled bathroom. The steaming water creates a boundary and puts me into a hazy mind. My spirit is cleared by the hot baptism, and I’m ready. I put a few lunch things into a bag and take another for collecting. I set off down the sandy beach with not much thought for what I am going to do, some sort of ritual there on the water and beach. A beachcomber, I see things as I go, a piece of driftwood looking much like a shark, then a dried starfish, crow feathers, a few wild daisies, some dry kelp, with a thought to make rattles later. All get put in my bag. I wonder what I am going to do, but nothing distinct comes to me.
104 Ruth Codier Resch Without Utterance: The sandy beach turns rocky, and I keep walking. I’m wearing hiking shoes, and think I’m seeing actual little paths in the rocks for footing. I’m dreamy and walk right along toward a long rock peninsula as a destination, but I don’t get to it. My attention is arrested by a tiny waterfall from high cliff that has risen on my right, ledges of crumbled rock. The water flows into a little pool in the rocks the size of my hand and drops down near my feet and disappears into a crevice. I’m entranced and fall further in reverie. I haven’t much experience making ritual myself, but it is my intention to make a good one now for my friend. I sit down on the ledge beside the pool of the waterfall to think, have my turkey sandwich and apple, but my mind isn’t thinking much. Somehow it is full. Finished with lunch, I cross the flat, brown-brown plateau of rock in front of me to a high promontory, where I watch the water spiraling far below. Still, I’m not thinking, yet a blessing begins to form. I take the driftwood shark from my cotton striped bag and cast it out into the air to watch it drop slowly down to the water. “Here,” I say to my friend, “I give to you a watery companion and ally to swim with you on this new journey you are making … whatever it is beyond where I am standing in this world. Your friend, shark, is a guide for you toward your next destination.” I send the crow feathers after the shark and speak about how crow is the spirit that flies between the worlds and a shape-shifter of the rules of each. “You, my friend, swam into the shark’s friendship. You and the shark slipped between your different realities already in life. Crow, with shark, will help you move in this new immensity.” I reach in the bag for the starfish, but it is no longer a dry skeleton. It has come alive again in the moist shadows. So it is right to return it to its watery home. As I send it into the air, “Be a starry beacon for my friend!” and I bless it for being willing to come with me to do this. I stand for a while in this blessing dream for my friend, thinking and reflecting on the time I knew him. Finally I’m satisfied that it is finished. I turn from the water and toward the cliff behind me to return down the beach. My whole being is stunned. As far as I can see to either side of me, the whole face of the high shear cliff across from me is a gentle seeping waterfall.
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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Weeds, ink dr
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PART ONE: THE PRECIPITOUS ABYSS
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