Our Creative Edge

Glad that I accidentally took the wrong road for Dillon Beach yesterday, because the road I ended up on (Rt. 116 W) winds through redwood groves with the Russian River to its mouth at the sea. There I sat on a bluff on one side of the river and watched a panorama on the other side that stunningly illustrates a permaculture principle, namely “the edges are where the action is.” (Plant, animal and mineral species congregate, communicate, commune with each other at edges of all kinds, to encourage diversity, integrity, stability).

I was at the EDGE of the ocean (the beach), at the EDGE where a river meets the sea, and there were obviously lots of fish present, because hundreds of grey pelicans and thousands of seagulls were on the other side of the river, peacefully intermingling. Most were resting/sleeping on the sand, but gobs of pelicans (and a few seagulls) were swirling in circles, looking down, and then suddenly diving into riffles (where stones create lots of EDGE with water) next to the shore.

Meanwhile, probably forty fat seals lay motionless, lining the EDGE where the water meets the river/sea. While I sat there one of them flopped his whole self into the water then flopped out again and, with a tremendous heave, flipped over onto his back to once again, lie supine. (His natural, unself-conscious manner in his body, plus the contours of his bodily form, reminded me of my late husband, Jeff. So many reminders, more than four years later!)

Then, of course, the tides were continuously creating and destroying EDGE in their relentless, mysterious synchronization with the Moon, and we humans (maybe 20 of us along a half-mile long beach) had also been drawn to the edge, full of longing yet mostly not knowing why, not realizing that we too, participate in the infinite panorama of life, and that our species, for all its current propensity for destruction, has its place in the whole.

We try to stay within the bounds of our cultural conditioning—to separate from our own bodies and ignore nature while achieving success, wealth, power; to “play it safe” in that unconscious structure—but something in us seeks to go beyond. The ocean symbolizes that mysterious Other that each of us feels within our own psyche, a dark, pregnant, inner cosmos where structures continuously form and dissolve in the vastness to which we are all surrendered.

I just about dissolved into the vastness myself yesterday. While peering closely at tiny, tide-created channels in the sand, a powerful rogue wave caught me from behind. Instantly, it rose to my armpits and, while just about jerking me off my feet, had the grace to not remove my car keys from the shallow pocket in my pants! What god did this? Who is responsible for this sudden awakening to the larger, mysterious presence that both knocks me down and holds me tenderly? Or was it the work of Jeff as trickster, laughing, calling— “Wake Up!”

And I had even read the sign: “This is one of the most dangerous beaches on the California coast. Do not stand at the shore with the ocean behind you”—or risk being caught by a rogue wave.

While I was peering into microscopic forms made by water’s EDGE with sand, the abyss nearly swallowed my form.

Inside me, too: at the EDGE between whatever I am paying attention to, and the awareness of the whole—what is attended to, the me that is paying attention, and the entire panorama within which I live and breathe—is where the action is. The creative edge, the place from which anything is possible, anything.