learning the language of echolocation
(all photos by Hop, wearing 69999. November 2022. Venice Beach, Los Angeles | Tongva Land)
Before I left California last year, I gifted my friend Ashanté Undrowned by Alexis Pauline Gumbs for her birthday. As I was buying it, I didn’t get myself a copy, I told myself it would come to me eventually. A few weeks after being in Maui, I opened a package from my friend Hodari to find the same book filled with notes of love, observation, deep knowing and intuition. Hodari knew which story, which moment would touch me deepest, and they knew to send this book to me. They heard the message I sent out and responded, all in “silence”.
Truly, what we imagine and hold close to our hearts is never really silent.
We speak to each other in the beyond.
(Remember this when the doubt creeps up).
As the years of 2021 and 2022 progressed, I had been in the ocean more than any other time of my life. I brimmed with gratitude for the ways it held me and healed me.
For allowing me to swim deeper, see brighter and access the buried reserves to hold my breath longer.
At night, my dreamscape mirrored my waking life. I flickered through scenes scattered with ———
Ridged oyster shells resting in my palms, luminescent soft pearls spilling out.
Holding the prolonged gaze of an ancient giant squid on a gray shore.
Vast floods and roaring tsunamis washing over places that felt like a mash up of New York, India and California.
Mythological aquatic beings sharing their language with me, and leading me to underwater cities.
Testing the emotion of surrender in between my bedsheets and duvet.
Feeling the fear and resistance paralyze my body in response to their outstretched scaly hands.
Inquiring, guiding, asking me to return.
Come back.
Come home.
Mustering the strength to respond.
Finding a way.
Giving in.
Handing my weight over in the stroke of an arm and push of a foot and allowing them to take me, home.
As I return to this, it’s foggy and gray on Ohlone Land.
The coast has been drenched in the pour of the atmospheric river over California.
I rest, I wait. I curl in.
I see my dreamscape in waking life.
As I return to this, weeks later, it’s flooding on Kanaka Maoli Land.
Even though I’ve traveled thousands of miles I find water pouring over again. Pressing up against my windowpane, soothing me to sleep, drenching my skin, softening the soil that I press cucumber and sweet potato seeds into, and coloring the shoreline brown from runoff and erosion.
As I return to this for the fourth time, I want you to listen, to join the choir by finding the closest water you can, ask what it remembers.
It forgets nothing but carries no expression of what could have been, only what it is becoming, I wish the same for us too.