Keeping The Light
The spark of a new conversation around our relationship to seaweeds, self and sustainability.
Solstice embers continue to burn in honor of “The Sun Standing Still” and the changing tone that has officially moved from mud to majestic, here in Maine.
This debut of my own ripening maturity was intended to ignite days ago, but as the light lingered on, I longed to be with it. To bask in the sunshine while walking barefoot in my gardens. To go to the farmers market and score the lemon balm seedlings I wanted for the apothecary, along with a full flat of strawberries to be made into jam. The annual attempt to savor the summer at its outset. Not so much standing still, but more of a time to dance with my senses to the rhythm of their intelligence.
As a Sagittarius sun who has stood still for too long, hiding her light from the world, digging deeply into ‘herstory’, I have not been at a loss for words, but have experienced a weakening faith that my words will create change. However, my higher guidance says “write NOW” so…here I am. Planting this offering, fertilized with hope, while the potent beams above cast their radiant blessings below.
To attempt to disrupt a strong siren call of community that revolves its days and nights around commodifying the coastline has felt like social suicide. Yet staying silent has only proven to extract vital resources from me that I desperately need on this journey of homecoming. It is my birthright. Shedding light on the dark is in my blood and the time has come to go with its flow.
“To belong to a place is to be embedded in it. Its struggles are your contentions, its harvests your wealth, its needs your purpose. Your place’s history is the story of your own becoming”
-Tokopa , “Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home”
Here in Maine, many have strong holdfasts to the local fishing heritages, going back several generations, creating a sense of pride and belonging. And while I find mystique in the morning mist on the water, while lobster boats bob mesmerizingly around a bay, I now see everything differently. A trance broken by an ancient foghorn that attuned me to the distant echoes of my own aquatic ancestry.
Though I was not born in Maine, I tapped into my maternal bloodline of maritime minerals and tidal intelligence as our summer visits with family morphed into a school year stay when I entered the first grade. Like my childhood friend, Nancy Drew, I circled several Hidden Staircase(s) before solving The Lighthouse Mystery that led to the roots of my family tree. A lineage of Maine lightkeepers, land tenders, healers and hardworking hands worth their salt, who left me a blueprint wafting within the marine layers that I have spent most of my adult life diligently decoding.
“The light burns bright. All well at the Head.”
~ Lighthouse Keeper Jaruel Marr (my great, great, great Grandfather)
Historically the job of a lightkeeper was to watch upon the waters for suspicious activity and storms brewing, ready to whistleblow warnings of potential hazards laying in the surrounding haze, obscuring clear vision. To tend the ocean waters as a sensory steward in relational space with the elements and an ever-unfolding understanding of the powers of the sea.
Another word for lighthouse is ‘beacon’.
bea·con
noun
a fire or light set up in a high or prominent position as a warning, signal, or celebration.
"a chain of beacons carried the news"
There seems no better time than the return of the sun’s radiance to embrace this lineage of light and embark on my own mission of tending the waters around and within me. A cyclical reminder, beckoning us to remember our brilliance and to share it boldly with the world. To become a chain of beacons.
It viscerally pains me to have such conflict in my heart about this sacred ground many call ‘Vacationland’, but I have only known as ‘home’. Yet it hurts more to have inaccurate portrayals of truth being allowed to continue in the global narrative, especially in the climate of misalignment we are living in, politically, socially, environmentally.
This is the tender space, rich with regenerative opportunity, we find ourselves in now. An intertidal zone of life and death choices that depend on our ability to cultivate an awareness that not only positively impacts the sustained existence of the human species, but also the life of sentient beings yet to be recognized, understood or valued in their relationship to our ecosystem. Everything and everyone has value, it just depends what lens we look through.
“It is a curious situation that the sea, from which life first arose should now be threatened by the activities of one form of that life. But the sea, though changed in a sinister way, will continue to exist; the threat is rather to life itself.”
― Rachel Carson
Apocalyptic awareness has now become an unfortunate reality of our global connective tissue. We have all been forced to witness what we have done to our earth (and ourselves) in a way that we can not forget. There is no going back, yet we can’t seem to agree on how to move forward. Some view these inconvenient truths as a result of the ‘Climate Crisis’, but to me this is more a reflection of a spiritual crisis. We have separated ourselves from sacred sources of divine nourishment and reciprocity to the point where we have forgotten the inherent value of the initial connection. We ironically seek a ‘wholeness’ that is our birthright by paying a huge cost to extract (separate) and ‘add value’ to something already worth its weight in gold.
A backstory takes backbone to tell and a patient ear to hear. I am grateful to any and all curious souls who join me at the next gathering around the fire…where I will begin to unfold this seemingly Never Ending Story that involves a little mayhem, lots of magic and as the name of the Substack implies, many stories inspired by and starring, Macroalgae.
But I will leave you with this morsel for the mind…
If we continue to allow recognized fisheries to exist in virtually unrecognized positions that foster extraction and allow destruction of vital habitats of biodiversity, while putting the value of the tourist dollar and the pristine projections of our fishing heritages above the value of the ocean’s health, we put our own health1 in jeopardy while being distracted by these mirages of yellow bricks, greenwaves and blue economies. Lies and half-truths are repeatedly woven into this tapestry of tall tales to keep this Oz-like capitalist creation a well funded fantasy. It’s time to wake up and remember, There’s No Place Like Home.
“This world we’ve been entrusted with needs us to start belonging here, while we still can – if we still can – and stop owning the joint, stop pretending they’re the same thing. Dying will teach you that none of us really own anything. It’s a conceit born of transience and amnesia. Belonging somewhere is us coming to our senses, while we still can. If we still can. It isn’t wise to wait for instruction on the matter from our own undoing.”
-Stephen Jenkinson, Neverland
*physical, mental, spiritual, emotional, and economic health*