Fire on Water
By: Jennifer Tarnacki
Tags: Climate Action, Climate Change, Extinction Rebellion, Climate, Fiction

“Blessed be water, our first mother. Bless the humility, always willing to take the shape of whatever otherness holds it. Bless the innocence, flowing forth without thought of what awaits it.” — John O’Donoghue

I’m floating on Kenai Lake on my paddleboard, smoke is pouring out from the other side of the mountain into the sky. It’s 6 am, an hour before the tourist shift starts. I trail my finger through the wet fire that feels like silk. Wildfire smoke mingles with clouds and reflects on the water. I can’t tell when water stops and sky begins. I’m dizzy. It’s hard to breathe, the fires have been burning for three months now. I miss October.

I first came here four years ago. In October it is the prettiest, frosted, frozen. The winter seals it like a tomb. Those who stay through the year watch in a waiting game for the glacier to melt into the holiest of waters, tide rising cold and wild, so blue. I pile on sweaters over a wetsuit and get out in the middle as soon as possible, the bears still in their dens above. The water feels like a baptism. Laying half asleep on the board, I watch while a loon, glittery in the frost, glides through the water. I love you I love you I love you. I make no claim on you, but a blessing.

My eyes follow the loon as it dips below the surface. The glacier melts into this lake, which turns into river, rising into rapids that go tumbling into Cook Inlet, towards the gulf, and to the sea, eventually. The salmon out there stay for seven years, before they come back here to lay eggs in this precious confluence; sacred nursery waters. The loon resurfaces. Memory keepers, those animal elders, guarding the entry into the mystery. It always seemed like it was just under the surface; a deeper knowing. The ancient call from the luminous sea. I could only ever get to the threshold.

A howling breaks me out of my memory reverie. It’s 6:30, and a July dawn is breaking, something is calling out wildly into the gray summer morning that feels more like fall; smoke and darkness on the horizon. I hear panic. Something howling incessantly. Is that a dog? The howling continues for another 20 minutes, relentless. A long wail, mournful. I’ve never heard such a sound, or heard it last so long. It reverberates into the smoke gathering between the mountains. Has it lost its owner? It wont stop. I need coffee. I get off the board and go into work.

I open the campground office up. “NO CAMPGROUND FIRES”. I put the sign up. The Swan Lake inferno a few miles away still isn’t under control.

“No campfires? I’m going to call the Soldotna office to verify” an RVer complains.

I feel for him. People spend lives dreaming of AK, working to get here, once in a lifetime trip.

“Sorry, sir, the wildfires are still out of control”. Actually, its not so much a fire, as an inferno. 600,000 acres, impossible to contain.

Image courtesy wildfiretoday.com

Someone walks in, “I read online there is a bridge around here you can watch spawning salmon?”

“Not that I know of. It’s catch and release dolly varden and trout here on the Kenai, and you can catch sockeye during the second run in the Russian River.”

Salmon have been dying in the streams around Cook Inlet, floating to the surface with their egg sacs still intact. 81.7 degrees in a stream nearby. Cook Inletkeeper’s science director says they didn’t predict that for another 50 years. The Russian River has been fished for 9,000 years. Bears been fishing there for longer.

“No”, she insisted, “I read it online, it’s around here”. She points to a place on Google maps on her phone, “Here. How do I get there?”

She’s pointing to somewhere around the top of the mountain. I gesture out the window. She looks disappointed. Salmon on a screen aren’t salmon, though.

Someone comes in, “There was a baby coyote seen wandering around Skilak Lake road early this morning”. Thats 30 miles from where the howling was. They must have lost each other in the smoke.

Rv’s and trucks speed past the campground. The smoke makes it hard to breathe here. A helicopter flies above getting water from the lake to douse the inferno.

News report ‘7 whales found dead in Alaska over one weekend’ Another says the whole puffin colony died in the Aleutians. The RV’s check out. I go empty the recycling.

‘A Gray Whale Washed Ashore in Alaska May Hold Clues to This Year’s Deadly Migration. Many of the gray whales found dead this year have suffered from malnutrition. Researchers are rushing to find the cause.’

I get up and look at the moon rising, her light falling over me like cool soft linen. A friend tells me an ancient Alaskan shaman’s prophecy: when whales swim up river, humanity is doomed. I drag myself from the watery depth and put on my mask. More pretending. Business as usual. I feel like a wolf, chewing at the cages of the old way of being.

“Where should we go?” a visitor asks, looking at their phones. The gulf between screens and reality widens.

Breathe the air. Can you smell that? Thats the scent of cognitive dissonance. No, this isn’t the Alaska you expected, because the Alaska, the wilderness, on our screens, in our minds eye doesn’t exist any more. Wilderness left on Earth is an illusion, narrated by David Attenborough.

“Is there WiFi here?” a kid asks.

“No”, I lie.

The water is beginning to turn to fire inside, too, so I go and wrap myself around a spruce tree, tasting the resin of sap on my lips, looking up at the puzzle of boughs. Lend me your grace, I whisper, help us rewrite the future.

In the Allegory of the Cave, Plato writes of captives chained together inside of a cave, facing the cave wall in front of them. Behind them burns a fire. Between the fire and the captives are puppets performing in front of the firelight, casting shadows on the cave wall. Unable to turn their head and look at the fire burning behind them, or at the puppets, they stay fixated on the flickering on the wall.

I wake up to a news headline “Cease and desist all fossil fuel use, immediately. Sing the praise of the sea”. It was a dream. Shadowy figures said things to each other in a building. They made a decision. I see the last light in the dying whale’s eyes fade, while they shake hands.

What am I doing here, chasing the ghosts of wildlife? Chasing whales and theirs songs, seals and their tumbling, playful otters. To witness their lives and their parting, honor their time on earth. To say “I am so sorry”. Extend them purple hearts, medals for their courage. Bless their journey to their next destination, may it be more peaceful there for them.

Are they going the way of the others, the cave lions and mammoths and saber toothed tigers and the dodo, the ones lost into some echo of memory, no longer in form here? Those on the way out of this Earth this time, who will remember their singing? In a distant future, I imagine a bear paw print painted onto a cave wall.

I see the dead whale that washed up to shore under the Placer River bridge. Scientists gather samples to bring back to the lab to do autopsies. What is the cause of this? Thirteenth whale to wash up this summer.

I want to drum with a friend, say a prayer of peace, of parting, for the whales, but the smell is too bad. Grief, the last taboo.

Whales, older than time. Whales, cosmic consciousness. Some of the oldest living things on the planet; record keepers, myth makers, swimming deep in the unconscious depths like guardians of another world. Singing fossils, surviving through the millennia.

All the times she swam, thrumming with song, she can’t sing to us anymore. In death she wasn’t even important enough to re sacralize. I want to leap at the scientists, with their samples. Shake them by the shoulders, ask to see the tears in their eyes. To show some goddamn reverence.

I always loved whales so much.

They speak right through the hollows of my ribcage into some coral lined memory of an ocean past. They always felt like sideline companions, subtly championing from the great blue beyond, holding our memories at night while we sleep.

I turn away from the stinging smell with wolf fury, like licking a wound clean. Perhaps if we whisper to them that we love them, that we’re sorry, that we don’t ever want to let them go. Perhaps if we loved them, a song of praise would reverberate; whale tones and human cries of gratitude, “I surrender Earth!” A roar would join, a splash would follow, and a whole orchestra of life from the pregnant womb of silence would penetrate all waters, oceans, lakes, and streams, down to the very water in our cells, and lead us back to the wells.

Statistically unlikely event, it was concluded. But there’s likely many more whales dead than just the ones we can see. Inconclusive, it’s reported, with a cold scientific tone, from the prison of the intellect. As if the massive loss of life isn’t something to drop everything and honor by grieving. The final insult, Death, was not enough to honor.

The irreverence for the sacred, it chills. Whales, otters, birds, honeybees. Things dying everywhere. So half alive from subsisting only on shadows flickering on the cave wall that even death feels like a dream.

No, the answers wont be found in a lab, because they’re to be found in the last light in the dying whales’s eyes.

It is written, in the book of Sioux, they have gone into the Earth, and nothing will coax them out but the people dancing.

I wake up in the night, covered in sweat, heart clenched. Fire, fire. Alaska on fire, the Amazon river on Fire, Siberia on fire, what’s next. What is coming. Nothing makes sense anymore, standing on shifting sands, next to the ghosts of the future. We have built an empire for ghosts. I feel like I’m surfing a giant iceberg tidal wave of glacial melt about to crest.

I dream of coyote. Her howl for her lost baby, her lost future, fixes on my heart.

There was no where left to go but into darkness. The banality of apathy, the deadly lack of courage to change. Despair spreads like tentacles snuffing out light, engulfing me in black ink, suffocating and crawling over my mind like spiders. How to grieve a dead humpback? Why can’t we share this world with them. It’s a crazed grief. The kind that could make you dive into the deep end.

9pm, the office closes. Nothing seems to be able to soothe the blaze within. I go back to the lake to watch the sky fall over the water, to dive into the liquid river of light, and ask the Great Threshold one more time: How do I praise you?

Mind on fire, I plunge into the silence, into the place of lunar dwelling.

Belonging seeps into my bones again, bones that are indeed made of minerals from this sea. I imagine the spark of fire in my mind leaping into the water, cooling into a droplet of glacial melt from winter, becoming the bright liquid blue of spring, a wave cresting onto shore to seep into soil.

The air in my lungs feels dirty. Let the fires melt our hearts, I pray, whispering it into the water. The burning times have reappeared.

I feel a rumble, like a freight train at the bottom of my soul, growling in intensity as it approaches the surface. It comes speeding up so fast theres no time to stop it. Its a caged wolf’s howl for freedom; a sharp edged, plaintive yearning song.

In darkest hours of the wasteland, there is a cry for the Grail and the Goddess. The eternal life giver: water. Our first mother. To treat the burning like the cry of suffering that it is. A rage, a cry, a wail from our mother, from the lost sacred feminine. Land was always mother, peaks and valleys her undulating curves, the open fertile spaces where the future is sowed and reaped. To drop to our knees and say of course, I’ll do anything for her to live.

The great womb of the Earth, the ocean, not supporting life. How to grieve that?

Grief like that so big only water battering rocks, like a shipwreck, could match the wail. Something wild inside writhing and rocking like a storm, a surge of sea waves, white capped and frothy, like the rage and impotence of loss.

As it trickled in, then turned to a river, a deluge, the intensity pounding like pewter swirling storm waves, I sank into the crucible within, surrendering to the unanswerable why, feeling so deeply the grief and the sorrow in the world that a spirit took mercy and lifted my chin up and said,

“Here… Look, child.”

Peeking out from the lunar world of shadow, a tiny silver crescent moon rose, faintly at first, above the storm.

Bones made hollow I stood, but lighter, at the end, licked clean from heaviness as the last of the waves licked the salt away like a sweet pup licking my face, the way the tide rhythmically licks the shore.

The whale, after her song fades, once her body disintegrates, when all thats left are her bones in the sea, I follow the tears in, find the bones, and find the spirit of whale, who ensured they weren’t forgotten. She holds them out to me in her old barnacle laden knobby flippers, and with a twinkle in her eye, helps sing their song back into my heart.

There’s only one thing left to do. Rise up from the ashes and sing the praises of whale, like the whale sang the praise of the sea.

I peer closer into the dizzy depths rippling on the surface of the lake, into the deep waters of eternal feminine instinct. Supple, yielding, but unrelenting in life force; the mighty creative She. The kingdom of yin, where whales swim and ancestors remember. It’s a realm of image, memory, and myth, where soul callings abide, where things wait to be born. Beckoning from worlds of lunar reflection as feelings, whispers, nuances, shifts at the threshold. Not tremors, not yet.

It’s a different kind of courage, the courage of leaping into the dark unknown within. A great unlearning. Out of the intellect, out of the senses, out of logic, into an imaginal void; the invisible shadows at the bottom of the psyche. Something closer to instinct, closer to the stars. A truth beyond understanding.

Open up the door to the void, step over the flaming threshold, and with only the faith of a mustard seed, lean into the annihilation of all that is known, and dive into the velvety black richness; the dark side of the moon.

From the interior depths it surfaces, fleeting at first, out of shadow. Then resurfaces. A flickering from within a deep well.

A flame.

From the darkness, like the winter solstice sun rising after the long dormancy of winter, replenishing from itself, self-giving; an eternal light.

With that tiny flame not bigger than a matchstick, illuminate the shadows within. Unveil the darkness in its majesty, and allow the great slumbering She snake, the soul in the loam, the voice from the imaginal void, to coil up to the surface. Bring her truth into the light of the electric sun, so that Mother Earth and Father Sky may dance. And the whales will laugh with relief.

In the Hermetica it is written that at the center is the life-giving sun, which is an image of the life-giving soul at the heart of every person. Soul-making is to bring forth from the furthest depths, from the alchemical ocean of our tears, the plenitude within the emptiness; the wellspring. Rising through shadow, through fire and smoke, to the Great Threshold, the interface where imaginal creation and reality meet, so that the light within creates the sky.

As within, so without. As above, so below.

Rise up, phoenix of mudborne starlight, this is our beloved home, our very own cosmic Garden. If our hearts are planted by the sun, the watering of those seeds into being is our game. Gathering energy from the earth’s magnetic crystal core, up through rock, plasma, water, magma, clay and mineral, to become a mini cosmos. A clay crucible for the human flame. The way the silver crescent moon rises out of shadow to become whole, and with a momentum it could never stop, becomes luminescent from within.

I want to bang a drum, sing a praise of gratitude to the stars, beholding them as they behold us. I want to light up the sky with candles trance and song, dance with the cycles of the giant pearl in the sky.

Build a ship, rudder and mast, to protect the light within. Steer her down water made of lilting whale song, memories from the mini cosmos within dancing Sphinx-like in front of the bow. Sailing into the Great Mystery, singing praise to the riddle, etching memories of whale song and bear paw into cave walls, dreaming the new dreamtime into being with mighty hope.

We are the myth makers, the memory keepers, the web weavers. Now it is our job to hold up the sky with our love.

In ancient philosophy, pearls were said to symbolize the coming together of fire and water. Pearls, solidified cosmic energy, are celestial potential. In the fertile womb of grief they are hidden; secret doctrines written at the core of the core.

The dance in the bones, the wildfire in the soul. Out of the womb of dark silent grief it came. At first, a howl. A howling of Earth’s lungs, the howling of coyote in my lungs. The unconquerable shout at the midnight hour. One thing left to do, rise up, stomp our feet on the dust of the wasteland, dance the dance of freedom, and call in the rain.

We are the stardust. We are the last light in the dying whale’s eyes. We are the ancestors of the future.

“We are the ones we have been waiting for.”

Coyote, I wonder if she tracked her pup through the smoke, gathered him up in her paws, licked his scared face clean and, with the instinct of millennia, showed him how to make a den.

I hope so.

Source: https://i.redd.it/09atoovu3ba01.jpg

Song of Amhairghin