Drawn to water
Three true stories
Meeting a Sage on a Beach
A little over two years ago I found myself one evening walking on Limatour Beach. The waves were unrestrained, rapidly descending on the shore and then sliding back out again. I was at least a mile north of the parking lot, heading in the direction of the seal colony. Just ahead of me, an enormous flock of seagulls were gathered close to where the water met the sand, and a man was circling around them.
Usually, I’m nervous when strange men approach me. However, as this squat, bearded little fellow approached me, I didn’t feel my usual anxiety. He greeted me by asking, “Can I tell you a story?”
A little unsure as to how to respond to such an salutation, I nodded.
He proceeded to tell me this story, in a rapid-fire cadence:
“A little while ago I was walking up this beach, and I saw a woman walking in the other direction, the way I’m walking now. As she approached, I could just tell that she was a really good person. And when she passed me, I asked, ‘did you see any seals’ — you know there’s a seal colony at the end of this beach, right?” I nodded. “And she said, ‘no, but it’s okaaaay.’’ He drew out her words with a tone of resignation. “And as she passed me I realized that she didn’t mean that there weren’t any seals, but that sometimes life doesn’t give you what you want, and that you have to accept that. So I yelled after her, ‘thank you’!” And I just wanted to tell you this story, because you seem like a really good person too.”
And with that conclusion, he gave a jaunty nod and continued down the coast, presumably towards the next recipient of his wisdom.
There are times we are given a gift that we aren’t yet ready to receive. As he strutted away from me, I knew he was right. Yet in my heart I was reluctant to accept this idea. I didn’t want to accept that I had been raped and the ensuing outcome. I wanted to rail against fate or circumstance or whatever had caused that event to take place. Acceptance felt impossible without justice, and justice wasn’t possible.
Body in water
I was raped September 18, 2021.
The night it happened, as he was becoming amorous, I said to him, I’m not feeling very confident about this.
He became enraged, and screamed at me for hours, going through cycles of telling me he was ending our relationship, accusing me of promiscuity, shaming me for aggravating him, the stress this was causing on his health, among other things. He made me feel like I had to choose between being loved and feeling safe.
Coerced, I felt too scared to say no.
After it happened, the next morning, he said, I wasn’t my best last night.
He said those words after typing out his morning pages into 750words.com. I’ve always wondered what accounting he wrote of that night. Trying to make sense of what happened, I acknowledged that he must have felt rejected after I said I wasn’t feeling confident — but before I finished my sentence, he interrupted, “I didn’t feel rejected, I felt tricked.”
I couldn’t have tricked him if he hadn’t felt entitled to something. Much later, I realized that his words and actions meant he didn’t misunderstand me, he just didn’t like what I’d said.
At first, I thought it was my fault, for setting him off. He was an artist, a vegetarian, he worked at a museum. I’d always thought he was so smart, so enlightened.
It took several days for the full impact to settle in: he had raped me.
In the ensuing short weeks, a cold gulf opened up between me and my body. I didn’t feel connected to myself. My sleep was full of nightmares, my waking hours were spent dissociating. It’s so difficult to explain — I still stand, but there was chasm inside me where my sense of self used to be. He had ripped up the root of myself.
The worst was the sensation of a phantom hand at my neck. For at least ten months, I awoke every morning feeling that hand, clutching my throat, the feeling remaining throughout the day. My voice became much hoarser, shallower. My body carried the impact of being silenced.
During this time of disconnection, I began to feel a longing to be immersed in warm water. It wasn’t that I felt unclean. I wanted the warm embrace of water, something to ease me and my body back into connection with one another. My apartment only has a shower. One time, traveling for a workshop, I splurged on a hotel with a jacuzzi in the room, just for that. I soaked in those waters for almost three hours. It wasn’t enough, but it was something.
At some point, I listened to this podcast; towards the end, it mentions that the victim continues to take ice baths just so she can feel her body. I couldn’t help but feel a little relief, I wasn’t the only rape victim to struggle with this. It almost suggested my reaction was normal.
My rape was exacerbated by the people who didn’t believe me, those who defended my rapist, or said they didn’t want to know. I’m still not sure how to process a community that is comfortable with having a rapist who is a member, and punishes his victim for speaking up.
In the years since, fortified with so. much. therapy, I am regrowing tendrils of connection to myself. I’ve taken up regular swimming, continuing to find comfort while submerged in water. Swimming led to a new series of etchings that I am currently working on, one in progress image can be seen above. They may be a bit cliché — woman swimming, collective unconscious, ocean, blah blah blah.
Yet I have been to the depths, and somehow survived. Now I’m surfacing, words and imagery spilling out of me, as I return to buoyancy.
Creek Cleanup
We began by pulling the abandoned tires out of the stream. Others collected all the detritus — old shoes, bottles, spark plugs, children’s toys, a few needles, trash to be hauled away. A month later, we pulled up the non-native plants; Himalayan blackberry, English ivy, French broom, cat’s ear, acanthus.
The next month, we planted indigenous plants; buckwheat, lupine, and monkey flower. As we return each month, the location has shifted from a dumpsite to a burgeoning habitat.
Now when we meet, it’s mostly weeding and cleaning up any litter that’s accumulated in the course of the previous month. During the dry months we haul buckets from the stream up the embankment to water the plants. Some days, it’s a struggle for my bad knee to carry a heavy bucket of water uphill. On those days, I take the long-handled grabber and pick up trash along the avenue that borders the creek site. It’s not glamorous, rather, quite the opposite. And yet, it’s something that makes me feel deeply connected. I know that each cigarette butt, styrofoam takeout container, or piece of plastic will not end up in the Pacific Garbage Patch, or in the stomachs of sea turtles, seabirds, or marine mammals. Nothing ever really goes away; I know that what I collect will end up in landfill instead. And I’m aware what I’m doing is so small. However, I’m reminded of the words of Rebecca Solnit:
“The fact that we cannot save everything does not mean we cannot save anything and everything we can save is worth saving . . .and remember that taking care of something else is an important part of taking care of yourself, because you are interwoven with the ten trillion things in this single garment of destiny that has been stained and torn, but is still being woven and mended and washed.”
I know that this discarded plastic fork, this plastic straw or water bottle, will not sully the creek, will not be washed downstream, will not end up in the ocean.
Rape is threefold wound: violation, isolation, powerlessness.
To heal is more than just to get better, it’s a return to empowerment and interconnection. It is in welcoming; welcoming your body back, welcoming a new community. It is regaining your voice to tell your story, it is in service, cleaning up a creek and knowing your small efforts might have a ripple effect on the ecosystem.
In the past, the creek dried up to a trickle in the dry months, the tintanubulations of its song muted. Now it runs year-round, its song restored, flowing out to the sea.