Secrets I Have

Last week on Monday I announced on these pages that I would write weekly for a while about ocean deities. I began with the Inuit sea goddess Sedna. On Friday an ancient Aegean sea goddess came up and spoke to me, from her glass case at the Legion of Honor Art Museum in San Francisco.  She said, “Write about me this week, let me speak.”  She also encouraged me to read a poem that fifth grader Addison Bell had written about her as part of the “Poets in the Galleries” program at the SF Fine Arts Museums.  I’ll begin with what she told Addison, that she was simple, alone, tired, ready and full of secrets.

Simple.

Simple am I.
My burnt sienna skin
is sad and cracked
Alone.  Alone I feel
No emotions, no love
I lean one way
I lean the other.
Tired. Tired I feel
Tired of standing
In the clear glass cage.
Haven’t laid down
Since they put me in here.
Ready. Ready to raid this place.
They were the ones who did it.
Secrets. Secrets I have
Secrets I cannot tell this modern world.

Addison Ball, 5^th Grade, Mill Valley
_______

When you’re 4500 years old, I guess it’s understandable that no one remembers your name.

But still - “Cycladic Figure”?   Surely they could do better than that.  The names of so many of us ancient women are lost or forgotten.  “Daughter of…,”  “Wife of….,” “Mother of….” is the only way we are identified.

You “moderns,” as the poet Addison describes you, archeologists, and grave robbers, have found thousands of these simple, geometric, almost modern looking (you say) marble figures.  Most of them are female, left in tombs on one of the Cyclades, the 200 small Aegean islands in a circle (cycle) around the holy isle of Delos.

Made of precious marble, they are small enough to be grasped by worshipper or corpse, as well as by travelers, it seems, since the figures have also been found as far away as Egypt.

These figures depict me, but I am a force mightier than any stone grave object.  I am holy female, the great mother.  Yes, there are a few Cycladic male figurines also, with a cute little penis between their legs.  But most of us are female, and my simple triangle tells you who I am. 

I look small, the one Addison saw in San Francisco is only five inches tall.  My people were sailors and farmers and shepherds, travelers, so they wanted a reminder of me they could hold in one hand.  But even though my people lived on small islands, they were surrounded by an infinite ocean, and they knew I am as large as the waves, as deep as the sea.

I don’t think I will tell you my name.  Addison heard me say, “Secret.  Secrets I have, secrets I cannot tell this modern world.”  You moderns want to know everything, explain, categorize.  But my face is bare to show I am not just one female, not even just one god, one name.  I am nameless and all names.

Later the Olympian gods of mainland Greece seized the people’s imagination and became more specialized, more individualized, more modern.  We Cycladic gods and our people lost power, but we did not disappear.  I live on especially in my descendants Artemis and Aphrodite.  Artemis (and her brother Apollo) were born on Delos and always loved the islands and the sea, running free in nature.  Aphrodite was born even earlier, on another island, Cyprus, and you have seen pictures of her, and her Roman equivalent Venus, born from the sea, rising from the waves, on a clam shell.  Poor Aphrodite, she still embodies my powerful creative sexual force, but those patriarchal Greeks trivialized and fantasized about her as only seductive and self-centered.   But she began, like me, as so much more, all female energy, all birth and death and sea and land and fertility and abundance.

Arms crossed, always I stand that way.  Well, my figures do, so my arms won’t break off.  When I sailed and swam and blessed and birthed and travelled with my people beyond the grave, my strong arms and legs were always in motion, I pushed, pulled, planted, embraced, saved.  Female creative energy doesn’t just stand there.  Addison heard my cry that I want to move.

You moderns always want to know what we were the gods and goddesses OF.  What was our specialty, our portfolio?  Well, I am an island deity and an ocean deity, I comfort women in birth and all people in death, I travel with sailors on scary seas and accompany shepherds on lonely hillsides.  I promise new life when winter seems endless and embody the abundance of spring.  I am mother, great and powerful.

That’s all I’ll tell you.  The rest is my secret.

Copyright © 2018 Deborah Streeter

Ocean Deities

I’m starting a new series about ocean deities from various world traditions. Today I begin with Sedna, Inuit ocean deity.   My usual writing style is to research, describe and explain (as I am doing right now.)  In this series I intend instead to imagine the deities speaking for themselves.  I will try to be accurate and respectful of different cultures, but I am not an expert in anthropology or mythology.   I am intrigued with how prescientific people create stories to understand the mysteries of the deep.  Often it’s an ocean goddess.   Why female?  These myths say more about human nature than about the ocean.  We still personify and anthropomorphize the sea and its creatures. Let’s see who might be ruling the deep.

From fineartamericacom Sedna is a painting by Antony Galbraith which was uploaded on April 11th, 2015I am Sedna, goddess of the deepest ocean for my people the Inuit, people of the north who live and die by the sea, my realm, my home.

The Inuit tell many different stories about me, how I came to live here in the cold dark depths.  Some stories say I was a beautiful human woman who was strong willed, and refused all suitors. So my angry father threw me into the sea.  When I clung to the kayak, he chopped off my fingers, one by one, and that’s how seals and walrus and whales were birthed.

Other stories say my father forced me to marry a mysterious suitor who turned out to be a bird, some say Raven himself, who then imprisoned me, and when my father came to rescue me, Raven was so mad he churned up the sea into a horrible torrent.  Only by chopping off the fingers of my clinging hands did my father survive, while I fell to the depths.

When the ocean is rough and the Inuits can’t hunt, their shamans try to appease me.  Sometimes the shamans are said to comb my long hair, which I can’t do it myself because I have no fingers, and from my hair are released marine mammals they can hunt. 

There are many other story variations, but they all seem to have me unwilling to marry, while my father or husband angrily trying to control me.  And the amputated fingers. 

In some stories I have a husband in the deep, but mostly I am alone with the sea creatures.  My powerful emotions and moods churn the sea.   Often I am depicted as half human, half seal or porpoise.   I have become a denizen of the deep.

They tell these stories to explain the changeable sea and the origins of the animals they hunt, which have warm blood but live in the cold sea. 

But I would tell my own story differently.

I live here because I can do what I want, no father or Raven or hunters can tell me what to do.  I chose to live here, but I wanted companions, so I chose to give parts of my vast body to create new life, new animals. I am a powerful swimmer and the ocean is huge.  The sea animals are my children, my friends and companions. We deep ones need lots of room to move around, and when we do, the ocean moves.  We like it that way.  

I am not angry at the people on land.  They have their home, I have mine.  We all have to eat and I understand their hunting the sea animals for their taste and strength.  I will help the animals hide and fight back when the hunters take too much, but we can all live together. 

They tell stories about how I am a big woman, and angry, but that’s just because they like their women to be small and docile.  Yes, the animals like my hair, but that’s because they like me, and my hair anchors them in the waves.  It feels great to have seals and sea lions playing in your hair.  And yes, I am large.  Skinny animals don’t last long in the sea. 

Don’t tell the Inuits, but sometimes I swim south to get warm and lie on the beach.  Goddesses need vacations.  My whales and dolphins manage things fine without me. 

But things are changing up here in the north, less ice, more oil rigs, fewer animals.  Now, these changes actually are making me angry, and it does seem to be mostly men on those big ships and rigs.  They may not have heard the Inuit tales, and I doubt they have shamans who can try to appease me.  They will feel the wrath of the sea.

Copyright © 2018 Deborah Streeter

Gathering of the Waters

In this column on “Ocean People” I’ve been writing about the various people I’ve met while serving as a Member at Large on the Advisory Council of the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary.  I’ve described the fishermen, harbormasters, environmentalists, divers, surfers, researchers, historians and business leaders who meet every other month to advise the Sanctuary Superintendent on protecting this 300 mile stretch of coastline and ocean.

I’ve written about my ambivalence about revealing to my fellow council members that I am not just an ocean advocate, but a Protestant minister.  But this week I tell the story of how I put both sets of skills to work by creating a worship service to help celebrate the Marine Sanctuary’s 10^th anniversary, and how I invited all the cool religious “ocean people” I knew. 

One look at this photo tells you I’ve been doing an ocean ministry called Blue Theology for a long time – this was 2002! 

The occasion was a big Ocean Fair to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the designation by the federal government of the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary.  I was serving on the Advisory Council for the Sanctuary at the time and I offered to gather interfaith religious leaders and lead a “Blessing of the Sanctuary” as part of the celebrations. I assured the federal NOAA staff that I was a firm believer in the separation of church and state, but if they wanted some kind of ritual alongside all the speeches I’d be glad to put it together.  Happily, they welcomed the idea, and later featured this photo in the news reports – we do look good!

My dear friend, Catholic priest Scott, (center) brought a conch shell and sage to burn in an abalone and some sweet acolytes.  John the Native American Ohlone leader brought his sacred staff.    I brought two of my blue blessing bowls that I’ve used in many water rituals.  Everyone brought readings about water from their sacred texts.

Representatives from many of the 15 National Marine Sanctuaries were in attendance for the anniversary, from sanctuaries in the Atlantic, Pacific, Great Lakes.  I asked them, and others I knew who were coming, to bring a small vial of water with them from their home tap, creek, river, lake, or ocean.  40 or so folks came up onto the stage, kids, federal employees, solemnly said where their water was from and poured it into one of the common bowls.  I held them up and said a prayer of thanksgiving blessing on the water. 

Then we processed, clergy and acolytes and kids and workers, with the bowls held aloft, through Monterey’s historic park, past the old Customs House, down to this little beach by the wharf.  I invited the religious leaders to read from their traditions about waters.  I can vividly remember Robert the Buddhist priest reading from Dogen’s “Mountains and Rivers Sutra.”  Then I poured the gathered water from the blue bowls slowly back into the bay, the sanctuary, the holy place.

From many places far and wide, the drops came together as one, and then we returned the gift, all back to its source, mother ocean.

My friend Nashwan, far right, brought water from the farthest away – Mecca, most sacred place of his Moslem faith.   This was just a year after 9/11, and Nashwan, a local architect, had visited many of our churches in that year, patiently explaining Islam and its wide landscape.  When I left the little beach after the service I looked back down and there were Nashwan and Ann, the president of the synagogue, deep in conversation.  Gathered together by the one water?

I first wrote this piece in 2016 for my other weekly column, “Blue Theology Tide-ings.” That July 2016 I was about to be formally installed by my denomination as a Community Minister for Blue Theology, a minister for and about the ocean.

We began the 2016 installation service with another Gathering of the Waters.  Again I had invited folks to bring water from their home or special place.  We used the same blue bowls.  Again the water built the community.  We remembered again that all water is one, a cycle of blessing and bounty.  The ministry I had already been doing for 15 years entered a new phase, a new stream, a new current, a new wave.  We were gathered by the waters.

Copyright © 2018 Deborah Streeter

Submerged Cultural Resources

Our “Ocean People” this week lifts up those who have lost their lives at sea, and those who keep their memory alive, for helping us care about all that lives in the ocean.

It used to annoy me at the Monterey Bay Aquarium that people would walk right by the big beautiful Kelp Forest exhibit with all its amazing fish and plants, and barely stop to look, but if there was a scuba diver in there cleaning the windows or vacuuming up the poop, the visitors would linger and look at the diver forever.  “Look, a diver, what are they doing,” they would ask me, the great volunteer guide knowledgeable about flora and fauna, but not so interested in diving.

But then I learned that a basic principle of “interpretation” (the art of sharing information about a park or museum or historical site in an imaginative way) is to make a connection between the story you are trying to tell and the visitor’s own story, to connect your story and their story.   The National Park Service “father” of the art of heritage interpretation, Freeman Tilden, named 6 Principles of Interpretation, and the first is: “Any interpretation that does not somehow relate what is being displayed or described to something within the personality or experience of the visitor will be sterile.”  So the guests are saying, I am a person, there’s a person inside that 300,000 gallon tank, that could be me, I wonder what it is like underwater.

Learning to make this connection helped me get over my similarly snide superior judgment about the value of the Maritime Heritage Program of the National Marine Sanctuaries.  Our tax dollars have funded all kinds of research into what NOAA calls the many “submerged cultural resources” in the protected waters of the Atlantic, Pacific, Gulf and Great Lakes.  Yes, that’s what they call shipwrecks, submerged cultural resources. 

I protested, “No, I am serving on the Monterey Bay National Sanctuary Advisory Council because I wanted to protect the fish and coastline, not to hawk shipwrecks.”   But, they explained, quoting Tilden, that’s how to get people interested and committed to ocean protection.  If they think, that could have been me, or you, in that ship at the bottom of the sea, they will want to protect it.   Care about the people of the ocean, those who lived by the sea, or died by the sea, and you will care about everything, human or not, that lives in the sea.

1933 Macon Flying Over ManhattanIn 1935, the airship USS Macon, a dirigible sort of like the Hindenburg, crashed off the coast of Big Sur with some survivors, some loss of life.  Dramatic eyewitness accounts and some photos appeared in the press, but the waters there are so deep and rough and dark that no one considered looking for the wreck until the 1980’s.  Underwater technology had improved, sonar and submersibles.  David Packard, founder of the Aquarium and of its research sister institution MBARI (Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute) as well as founder of Hewlett Packard, had also been Deputy Secretary of Defense in the Nixon Administration.  He knew that the Macon had been an important part of the pre-World War II Navy preparations for air defense (it could scout farther than planes and it carried Sparrowhawk biplanes in an internal hangar).  So he encouraged MBARI and NOAA to partner in using new technology to find the wreck. 

Their first expedition was a failure; they looked in the area where the old photos showed the Macon sinking, but found nothing, only fish and the dark.  Then they heard that the daughter of one of the Macon’s survivors had seen displayed at a fish restaurant in Moss Landing, near MBARI, a piece of metal girder that she recognized as being like airship pieces her father, the airship commander, had shown her as a girl.  Turned out the metal piece had been given to the restaurant by a local fisherman, who had found it in his net and thought it was some picturesque oddity.  Tracking him down the researchers asked where had been his favorite spot in that rich fishing ground, and he was able to help them fine tune where to search.   Next voyage – voila!  In 1500 feet of water they found the wreckage of the airship, its 5 biplanes and the enlisted men’s stove and chairs.  Another Titanic.

At the Point Sur Light Station there is now a display about the Macon, with old newsreels and recent pictures and the famous girder, a needle in a haystack ocean, the breadcrumb that helped the lost be found. 

And the Sanctuary folks were right.  Finding this historic, military, adventuresome, poignant, fisherman-found “submerged cultural resource” brought much more interest and protection to the coast than any rare coral or fish.

A skyhooks on the Sparrowhawk biplanes the Macon carriedOf course, the fact that there are dead bodies in these wrecks adds to its appeal and mystery, and reinforces the sense that the waters deserve some protection, an underwater cemetery.   MBARI and NOAA have sworn to keep the Macon’s location a secret, and the water is so deep and rough that it’s unlikely to be disturbed.

NOAA published a fascinating book about the historical contexts of all 15 National Marine Sanctuaries called Fathoming Our Past.  Describing the long history of human connections to the sea, it says, “A predictable by-product of marine travel, habitation, trade, harbors, and sea battles is the deposition of waste.  Coastal building foundations, human remains, discarded or lost items, from tools and household goods to ships, usually found repose in the water.” 

At first I liked this quote about how all these discarded and lost items find their repose in the water and can teach us about the past.  But then I thought, no, don’t call it waste. Those are precious memories. 

And I realized that my objection to calling it waste was because that I was beginning to connect these stories to my story. I have just finished moving my elderly father from independent living into a much smaller single room and we have had to go through every book and dish and hat and souvenir.  Each item has a story and it’s hard to let things go.  I imagine my kids doing the same with my things, hopefully years hence.

Helping my father move and going through all his stuff has been a poignant way to review his many years, to see what he has saved, what he brought with him here from New York 20 years ago, what he has had since he was a kid.  Much of it is precious, in value or in memories.  And much is what you could call mundane.  I cleaned out his kitchen, yesterday we went through clothes, I went through boxes and boxes of saved receipts and bills from years ago.  Much of it I threw away pretty casually.  But some I long to keep, because these items tell his story, and in some sense, my story.   I don’t want them called waste.  I don’t want my kids or archaeologists years hence to call my stuff waste.  It is evidence of my life and choices.  I know that in the long run it will all be discarded or rebought from the church rummage sale and then reused and then discarded.  

And if we have dramatic sea level rise, all our stuff will become not just waste, but submerged cultural resources! Some marine archaeologist years hence will try to describe my life based on my soggy items.

See it worked!  Their story connected to my story.  The sailors at the bottom of the sea and the fisherman finding the girder and my father and all my stuff and climate change and rising sea levels, all connect.  I will care more about the ocean not just because I love fish, but because I’m only 3 miles from the shore, and my precious stuff might get flooded and some marine archaeologist will call it waste.

Our stories are all part of a big ocean of stories, submerged or not.  Bring them to the surface!

Copyright © 2018 Deborah Streeter

The Sanctuary and The Highways

More reflections on the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, and how it protects two major north-south highways systems: Interstate Route One, carved precariously from the seaside granite cliffs, and the more robust and very wet “Kelp Highway.” And how, when a massive slide on the land highway killed many organisms on the kelp highway, Sanctuary staff did a dramatic highway rescue.

Highways are designed to get you there fast, so they tend to be loud and dangerous.  I lived for a year just a few blocks from busy noisy Highway 101.  I tried to block out the noise by imagining the constant traffic roar was a massive waterfall.  I knew it was dangerous because of the frequent police and ambulance sirens.

Highway 101 is not the only north-south highway on the west coast.  The older Highway One cleaves even closer to the coast, and gets me home every day here in the Big Sur area.   This  narrow windy interstate was first blasted out of steep granite cliffs as a WPA project in the 30’s.  Today millions of tourist every year move as fast as they can around the curves, while the precarious road itself is constantly in motion, shifting down the cliff or blocked by rockslides.

Last May after record rainfall, 13 acres of rock fell down onto the highway and across into the ocean, creating a new peninsula on the coastline the size of 10 football fields, 2 million cubic meters of earth.  Like the famous tree falling in the woods, no one in the remote slide area heard the avalanche, but surely it roared louder than any waterfall or speedway.  Remote it may be, but the 4 million tourists who drive that stretch between Southern and Northern California annually have noticed the blockade.  Our area’s economy has likewise been slowed down or blocked. 

The Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary protects 300 miles of coastline from San Francisco south to Cambria, including this dramatic granite cliff stretch.  Whenever, as in the past year, rockslides send large amounts of sediments onto the road, the Sanctuary Advisory Council and the local press debate whether these are “natural” phenomenon on a steep stormy west coast, or are human caused (should there really be a highway on this cliff?).  Should the road be repaired simply by bulldozing all that debris into the water, or would that constitute “discharge of dredge material into the Sanctuary,” which is outlawed in the Sanctuary’s Act, because it seriously harms the marine ecosystem?  The land highway usually wins out, but the Sanctuary has worked with CalTrans so that dumping happens in areas with fewer marine mammals and smaller animals who filter feed and would be choked by all the sediment.  It’s a balance, just as the land highway is balanced on the cliff.

Besides the several land highways along the west coast, 101 and 1, there are at least two ocean-based highways, whose many travelers are mostly non-human, and which are not built on rock but in air and under water. Millions of birds every year travel the Pacific “flyway” north and south, taking advantage of lagoons and estuaries for rest areas and refueling stations.  The so-called “kelp highway” parallels most of the US and Mexican coast, and then resumes off Peru and Chile.  This near shore forest (it grows only as deep as the sun can penetrate, 80-100 ft) provides a safe sheltered route of nutritious and hospitable algae.  Tens of thousands of grey whales swim this highway every year on their 12,000 mile round trip between Alaska to Baja to have babies in the protected Mexican lagoons. 

(Recent archeology and anthropology also suggests that early humans traveled this kelp highway from Russia and Alaska south, feeding on the rich marine organisms.  The traditional theory was that humans migrated inland, based on tools found in New Mexico from 13,000 years ago.  But recent discoveries of 18,000 year old tools on the Chilean coast, found in a campfire mixed with kelp ash suggest we humans may have sailed and beachcombed this kelp highway also. Scientists also posit that as our ancestors ate the nutrition rich marine organisms along the route - constant fish markets – it sped up the evolution of our brain power – more reasons to live by the sea!)

Bixby BridgeRock from the 2017 massive slide on Highway One (named appropriately for the nearest creek, the Mud Creek Slide) buried and killed many marine organisms, including a rare black abalone that clings to the underwater rocks of this remote stretch of coast.  Abalone were having a hard enough time as it was before the slide.  They are a protected threatened species because of several challenges – they are hemophiliacs and will bleed to death if torn from rocks.  Their diet is mostly kelp, but because of rising ocean temperatures and changing chemistry the kelp forests are shrinking, and the abalone are starving.  Abalone also plays a key role in the kelp ecosystem; they are an essential food source for the sea otters, without whom there would be no kelp (and hence no kelp highway).  Abalone and urchin are voracious kelp eaters, and without otters eating them, these invertebrates would clear cut the forest.  So abalone are protected for their own sake and for the sake of the otters and kelp. Because of their important and fragile status, the lucrative abalone industry has been shut down, and no humans are allowed to remove abalone anywhere on the California Coast.

When the massive slide seemed to have settled, the CalTrans Highway Department began a massive several year-long project to rebuild the highways.  As they prepared to bulldoze many of those 13 acres of rock and debris into the ocean, Marine Sanctuary staff went to work to rescue and relocate as many black abalone as they could.  We heard about their efforts at the January meeting of the Advisory Council.  The agenda was mostly a series of hard and depressing debates about how our current administration is rolling back all kinds of environmental protections, climate change policies, and is proposing to open up the West Coast to oil and gas drilling again.  

But then Sanctuary Superintendent Paul Michel told a small success story of a rescue mission he and a few volunteers made to the Mud Creek Slide.  For two days they gently removed (with a pie server) and relocated baby black abalone to a safer rocky section a few miles north.  400 of these rare black abalones had already died from the slide, but mid the crashing waves and continuing unstable cliffs, they moved 25 abalone to a new safe home up the coast, in the first known successful translocation of this species!

A worthy use of our tax dollars?  Well, to reopen the nine miles of closed land highway will cost $40 million.  Responding to this big abalone accident on the kelp highway with a few days of staff time and the bonus of one success story at an otherwise depressing meeting was totally worth it for this taxpayer.  Thanks, Paul. 

 Copyright © 2018 Deborah Streeter