Rock pools: finding what you weren't looking for

You are at the rocks. The tide surges in and draws back. Sometimes white foam slaps and sprays you, it’s a little frightening, and there’s a flutter of anticipation. It’s warm for this winter day. So you lie down on a wide slab of black granite. You peer into a rock pool. Just for a moment, you don’t want to be too silly, too childish, but this place recalls an innocent wonder, a sense that you might find something lost.

You’re hoping for starfish, but the pool is empty except for seaweed. The seaweed is frilly, it’s algae-forest green. There are two boring old black snails. They leave two fat trails across the sand at the bottom of the pool. Where are they going? Why? 

A slight breeze ripples across the surface. You’re warm in your puffer jacket and beanie. So you stay. It’s a tiny bit soothing, the way the seaweed ruffles in and out in the residual sway of the ocean. The sun does its work, massaging the tension in your shoulders. So Busy. So much to do. You should get up, keep moving, you need the exercise — but, just a moment longer, until the snails reach the other side, or wherever they’re going. 

A tiny taupe and brown striped fish with transparent fins darts out and back. You wait. Maybe you’ll see it again? Another fish pulses out onto the sand, it’s minuscule and black, a miniature cod perhaps. Its gills open and shut. Huh. It breathes, and soaks in the sun like you. That’s two fish. Then you notice a cluster of small orange and white anemones submerged on the side of the rock just below you, the pale flowers of them open to the tide. The stars of their petals? Arms? Reaching. Under them, in a crag is a wedge of iridescent blue, pink and silver — a broken paua shell. The sky and the sea rolled into a brilliant shard.

The pool is deeper than you first realised. Below the frilly green stuff, a dark corner is plumped with purplish seaweed. A few black mussels jut alongside three lumpy grey oysters, their puckered lips open to the flow. 

The clump of purple seaweed opens one amber eye. No way. It’s an octopus. An octopus is watching you. A tendril of arm coils out, coils back. The delicate suckers are like foxglove bells. And then you see: an orange starfish near the base of the rock like a fridge magnet that’s slid down down the side. Oh. And a green starfish next to the orange one next to the octopus. 

The octopus’ eye is something like the gleam of a planet at night.

An unfamiliar blanket settles over you. It feels like? What? Peace? Has peace settled over you? You’re not sure this is possible.

The impossibility of peace and the octopus remind you of the chef at the Turkish restaurant last Wednesday night. You’re between shifts. Cold. Tired. Not hungry, but you need to eat something before your next shift, or you’ll flake out. You push open the front door, stand before the counter of salads. In a hurry, and can’t be bothered. 

‘Are you alright?’ The chef asks, tall, round cheeked, blocky in a white uniform.

You glance up from the salads. 

‘You look sad,’ he says. His eyes, large and kind, are like those of a gentle animal in the field, greeting you.

Are you sad? A list unrolls, like a to-do list from the morning, an ever-present list of sadnesses. You say, ‘I’m okay. Just tired.’

He nods, tired, yes. Then he says, ‘You just look like something happened to you.’

You’re re-startled. Another list appears: the many things that have happened to you. You’ve got your shield on: the work clothes, the heavy jacket, the confidence. And yet he sees the humanity of you. This is totally shocking. Are you that transparent? Like little fish’s fins?

‘My next shift’s starting soon. I’m just tired,’ you say.

He nods, tired, yes. He makes you a kebab, quickly and gently. You sit out of sight while he does this.

‘Thank you,’ you say as he hands you the wrapped foil package. You don’t say: thank you for seeing me, thank you for being willing to hear. 

This moment infuses the following days. This willingness to acknowledge another’s sorrow. You are mostly too afraid to hold space for another’s pain, you’re scared of the whelm, the answers, the aching humanity. You’ve managed to sit-with friends in deep grief a handful of times, and it’s hard. It takes restraint. It takes breath. It takes the mantra: stay. It requires the understanding that: you can’t fix it. You think maybe this guy is light on boundaries. And you know this is a harsh interpretation, unworthy of the gentle exchange: it wasn’t that. It’s just that he saw something sad in your spirit, and was not afraid to say: I see it.

So now when the octopus looks at you from the pool. You understand: it’s seeing you. There’s no threat, no intention: just an acknowledgement, one being to another. You are here. I am here. If you began to cry, the octopus would accept this as salt water. And when the tide came back, it would be natural for you to swim, and even play. The octopus knows the tide will come back. This moment of low water is part of the whole. He hasn’t seen you before and he wonders if you are something to do with stars? He knows about the stars and tracks their patterns across the current of the night. He twinkles as neutrinos rush from outer space and through you, and him and the snails, anemones and starfish like it’s all salt, like it’s all water, and the ocean is big enough for the holding.

*

A quote from Claire Beynon

“We don’t know why we fall into a hole or what prompts it. Sometimes I think it’s some specific thing, but there’s also the wider field that presses in, the world situation, sometimes it feels very close and somewhat whelming and one can fall into a feeling of flatness or despair or sorrow, and as with everything it settles; and then it passes and is replaced with other things like hope and joy and awe and wonder and good faith and all of those other attributes. As we come back out of that place, we recover something while there — of ourselves — worthwhile and helpful for the next days, the next steps.” ~ Claire Beynon

A Poem

Listen to this wonderful recording of When You Are Old by W. B. Yeats, read by Cillian Murphy.

*

Book Study Group

Thank you to those Dunedin folk who responded to my question about starting a book study group. We are about to get underway! As the Rising Strong by Brené Brown book study group and I prepare for our first meeting, I’ve been reading a little into Brené Brown’s other work, and came across this resource which speaks into that willingness to be present with another’s story: Brené Brown: Empathy Misses.

Upcoming Event

22 June, 2.30 pm at Alexander Pianos in Dunedin, I’ll be reading one poem as part of the National Flash Fiction Day event: Rhythm and Sound. Might see you there.

Thank you for reading.

Kirstie