Glad Tide-ings

Glad Tide-ings

From here you can see the tide

turn like a door on its hinges:

We’re just going out. 

Do you want anything

from the ocean?

I read this poem last week on a sign overlooking the tidal Piscataqua River as it flows past Portsmouth, NH into the sea.

That’s Maine on the far shore.  Both states border the massive Gulf of Maine (Cape Cod to the Maritime Provinces) where high tides flow fast and inexorable, lapping right up to the dock, and the low tides disappear like nothing down into the mud.  When the Piscataqua’s tidal currents turn on their hinges they can be deadly; its flow is the third fastest in the US.

In Maine I visited my friend Sally Smith in East Boothbay.  She took me sailing (we were careful about the tides), fed me lobster roll and showed me her paintings, including this one of a fisherman’s camp at low tide, temporary beach.  (She was the fabulous artist in our Point Lobos poetry book.)

Tides on the move, as the Portsmouth poet says, are like going out for dinner.  Actually both lunch and dinner, since they come twice a day.  I looked up the poet, Robert Dunn, and he was your basic charming eccentric poet with the simplest of lives, working part-time at the library and roaming the streets selling his poetry chapbooks for a penny, insisting on giving 99 cents change for a dollar, refusing copyright.  A friend poet wrote a tribute to him called “The Penny Poet of Portsmouth.”

What is it about poetry and tides?  Both rise from a force surprising yet inevitable, incarnating power, change, mystery, fluidity.  “I must go down to the sea again, to the call of the running tide.”

Even scientists wax poetic when trying to explain the tides:  Rachel Carson wrote, “The winds, the sea and the moving tides are what they are.  If there is wonder and beauty and majesty in them, science will discover these qualities.  If there are not there, science cannot create them.  If there is poetry in my book about the sea, it is not because I deliberately put it there, but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry.” 

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On our Blue Theology service trips and pilgrimages we write poetry and prayers while walking by the sea, inspired by the mystery and majesty of the Monterey Bay tides.  I write these “Blue Theology Tide-ings” (get it?) every Wednesday.  Bluetheology.com

Stone Sea in St. Louis

Stone Sea in St. Louis

Andy Goldsworthy named this sculpture "Stone Sea, calling it "a sea made of what was once the sea."  Compressed in a sunken courtyard at the St. Louis Art Museum, it is 25 arches of stacked limestone, evoking waves.  It's the same local limestone that formed the ocean floor when a prehistoric ocean roiled here and across the whole Central US millions of years ago, its bedrock.

"Bedrock," he says" isn't this dead, static material, but is alive and moving, indeed limestone is made from compressed animal life.  I wanted to reveal the fluidity of landscape and the cycles of nature."

Ever the Blue Theologian, when it St. Louis this week on church business, I found the sea!  The ocean is everywhere, even in Missouri.  Fluid as bedrock.

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The ocean is wet in Pacific Grove – come for a service trip or adult pilgrimage.  Bluetheology.com

Nereids

Nereids

I want to be a Nereid!  In Greek mythology these immortal ocean nymphs embody all the bounty and blessing and beauty of the sea.  The Greeks have many ocean deities, being a seafaring people.  Olympian ocean god Poseidon, best known, is strong and powerful, like the sea, but can be angry and destructive (also like the sea). 

I am more partial to the 50 Nereid sisters, who swim with the dolphins, singing, splashing and rescuing lost sailors.  Rarely the stars of a myth, they are more the chorus, appropriately, since they are said to have lovely voices.  Even more appealing is their consistent benevolence; they help sailors in storms and point the lost toward shore. They embody the sea at its least angry and destructive.

Unlike so many women of ancient myth whom patriarchy sidelines and renders nameless, the Nereids are called by name:  Headland’s Hope, Calm, Bounty, Power, Glitter, Healer, Glory, Swell’s Embrace, Race with the Waves, Sparkler, Fair Isle, First Light, Eyes of the World, Blossoming Spray and more. 

Why in so many cultures is the sea referred to as “she” and embodied as a goddess?  Perhaps these prescientific ancients knew full well that the sea really is mother of us all, evolved as we are from those waters.  Experiencing the sea as a divine marine mother may also reflect the experience we all have in our mother’s womb, where the amniotic fluid sloshes like the sea (listen to an ultrasound) and is the same salinity as our original birthplace.  You don’t need to read Carl Jung or Joseph Campbell to know that myth is born from our deep collective unconscious, and the ocean is the deepest of it all.

Homer, Hesiod, Herodotus and Plato all celebrate and name the Nereids.  Artists render them widely on temple, sarcophagus and vase (this one is 4^th century BC, South Italy.) Disney tried to evoke their spirit in “The Little Mermaid.”  The movie honored well the Nereid gift of songs from the sea with some fantastic music, but Ariel and her sisters spend way more time pleasing Daddy and the prince than do the free female spirits of the Aegean. 

I’ve been rereading “Women Who Run with the Wolves” and asking, what am I holding back?  Maybe it’s time to swim with the Nereids.

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On our Blue Theology service trips and pilgrimages in Pacific Grove we sing ocean songs and listen for the voice of the sea.  Occasionally we spy a Nereid.  Bluetheology.com.  I post these “Tide-ings” here and on Facebook

 every Wednesday.