Story Info
Story Info
Lisa Chipkin & Aninha Livingston
Salt Point State Park, Jenner, California
2013
Type of Wounded Place
Story & Experience
Children Embody RadJoy Bird at Ocean’s Edge
Our focus for the Global Earth Exchange over the past two years has been on the vanishing bees. While we had set out with an intention to honor and bless them in this year’s Exchange again, a painful realization called us instead to a different focus: the wounded oceans of the earth…I have spent much of my life at the ocean: Early days playing in the sand and waves under golden sun, teenage years tanning and crushing on boys, adult years walking, meditating and vacationing. A touchstone of my life, the ocean has been a place I have gone for deep nourishment, communion and perspective when my life has felt too big or too small or somehow out of balance. It’s always felt like home, a place where I can rest and my soul can be rocked by the rhythmic waves and held by the ample, expansive arms of Mama Ocean.
Years ago, when I first learned of the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch”, or island of trash in the North Pacific Ocean by some estimates the size of the state of Texas, I was aghast. I felt as if a cannon ball had been shot through my heart. Made up mostly of plastic marine debris and chemical sludge concentrated in the northern Pacific gyre, it is fed by a stream of waste, runoff and the byproducts from a seemingly endless perceived need by humans to accumulate cheap, mass produced, disposable stuff, and a certain disregard for the consequences of this addiction.
Over time and on a broad scale, the sacred, life-giving, life-filled ocean waters of our earth have been poisoned with visible and invisible pollution. Human error, negligence, and even intention have resulted in an ongoing slew of noxious spills, runoff, and discharges—oil spills like the Exxon Valdez in Alaska in 1989, the Cosco Busan in the San Francisco Bay in 2007 and the catastrophic Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, toxic runoff from large scale clothing and other industries, nuclear radiation from Japan’s cataclysmic Fukushima Daiichi disaster…
As my awareness of these and countless other incidences has grown, so has my anxiety: Just how much of this toxic stew can the ocean and all living things in it absorb and digest before life is no longer possible? And what will the ripple effects of such a calamity be on all other life forms on the planet? Too overwhelming to fathom, I have conveniently buried these thoughts and done my (albeit small) part to improve the situation—collecting trash each time I visit the ocean, writing representatives and signing online petitions to support stronger regulations for polluting industries, making financial contributions to a few carefully selected environmental organizations, carrying my cloth bags to and from the grocery store…
Years ago, I stopped eating fish, first mercury-laden tuna, then all fish, rejecting them as too contaminated for ingestion. And one day in the last year, I realized with utter dismay, when a friend’s casual invitation to the beach resulted in my own strong bodily sense of resistance, that I had also rejected the ocean. Entirely. Written it off as too far gone with not enough hope for recovery. Realizing this, I was devastated. If I, a person who cares deeply for the magnificence, mystery and beauty of all the planet’s oceans could turn away from them in disgust, then there really was no hope for a better future. This thought was even more devastating, and being a spiritually and somatically-oriented person, I knew it was important for me to address it. I consciously embraced the feelings of contraction and rejection in my body, felt into the deep sadness almost instantly revealed beneath them, and then revealed in the underlying love I found again at my core. With a sense of renewal and empowerment, I determined to radiate my love for the ocean to the ocean indiscriminately, knowing that this was just as important an offering as anything else I could do, if not more. When I shared this story with my dear friend Aninha, she was deeply touched, and together we were inspired to focus our attention for this year’s Global Earth Exchange on making beauty in honor of all the oceans of the earth. So on June 22nd, a windy day in Jenner, California thick with mystical fog and chill wind, we gathered with our children on a cliff at the edge of the Pacific Ocean and held a simple and quiet ritual…
Children Embody RadJoy Bird at Ocean’s Edge
Our focus for the Global Earth Exchange over the past two years has been on the vanishing bees. While we had set out with an intention to honor and bless them in this year’s Exchange again, a painful realization called us instead to a different focus: the wounded oceans of the earth…I have spent much of my life at the ocean: Early days playing in the sand and waves under golden sun, teenage years tanning and crushing on boys, adult years walking, meditating and vacationing. A touchstone of my life, the ocean has been a place I have gone for deep nourishment, communion and perspective when my life has felt too big or too small or somehow out of balance. It’s always felt like home, a place where I can rest and my soul can be rocked by the rhythmic waves and held by the ample, expansive arms of Mama Ocean.
Years ago, when I first learned of the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch”, or island of trash in the North Pacific Ocean by some estimates the size of the state of Texas, I was aghast. I felt as if a cannon ball had been shot through my heart. Made up mostly of plastic marine debris and chemical sludge concentrated in the northern Pacific gyre, it is fed by a stream of waste, runoff and the byproducts from a seemingly endless perceived need by humans to accumulate cheap, mass produced, disposable stuff, and a certain disregard for the consequences of this addiction.
Over time and on a broad scale, the sacred, life-giving, life-filled ocean waters of our earth have been poisoned with visible and invisible pollution. Human error, negligence, and even intention have resulted in an ongoing slew of noxious spills, runoff, and discharges—oil spills like the Exxon Valdez in Alaska in 1989, the Cosco Busan in the San Francisco Bay in 2007 and the catastrophic Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, toxic runoff from large scale clothing and other industries, nuclear radiation from Japan’s cataclysmic Fukushima Daiichi disaster…
As my awareness of these and countless other incidences has grown, so has my anxiety: Just how much of this toxic stew can the ocean and all living things in it absorb and digest before life is no longer possible? And what will the ripple effects of such a calamity be on all other life forms on the planet? Too overwhelming to fathom, I have conveniently buried these thoughts and done my (albeit small) part to improve the situation—collecting trash each time I visit the ocean, writing representatives and signing online petitions to support stronger regulations for polluting industries, making financial contributions to a few carefully selected environmental organizations, carrying my cloth bags to and from the grocery store…
Years ago, I stopped eating fish, first mercury-laden tuna, then all fish, rejecting them as too contaminated for ingestion. And one day in the last year, I realized with utter dismay, when a friend’s casual invitation to the beach resulted in my own strong bodily sense of resistance, that I had also rejected the ocean. Entirely. Written it off as too far gone with not enough hope for recovery. Realizing this, I was devastated. If I, a person who cares deeply for the magnificence, mystery and beauty of all the planet’s oceans could turn away from them in disgust, then there really was no hope for a better future. This thought was even more devastating, and being a spiritually and somatically-oriented person, I knew it was important for me to address it. I consciously embraced the feelings of contraction and rejection in my body, felt into the deep sadness almost instantly revealed beneath them, and then revealed in the underlying love I found again at my core. With a sense of renewal and empowerment, I determined to radiate my love for the ocean to the ocean indiscriminately, knowing that this was just as important an offering as anything else I could do, if not more. When I shared this story with my dear friend Aninha, she was deeply touched, and together we were inspired to focus our attention for this year’s Global Earth Exchange on making beauty in honor of all the oceans of the earth. So on June 22nd, a windy day in Jenner, California thick with mystical fog and chill wind, we gathered with our children on a cliff at the edge of the Pacific Ocean and held a simple and quiet ritual…
Salt Point State Park, Jenner, California
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