Letting the earth have its way
ANA MENDIETA, CREEK, 1974 © THE ESTATE OF ANA MENDIETA COLLECTION, LLC.
A blessed meme is circulating the internet that reads, “the girl boss is dead, long live the girl moss (lying on the floor of the forest and being absorbed back into nature).”
YES. Let earth have its way with me, in the most sensual ways possible.
Let it turn my to-do lists and screens into flowers, fungi, roots, and cloud formations.
When I'm at a favorite outdoor spot, I like to imagine my mind and body dissolving into the landscape. Lately, this spot has been a little bend in a river near my apartment, just as the sun sets and the sky melts into cotton candy pink and smokey lavender. I let dewy grass tickle my ankles, a blanket of humidity wrap around my body, and the sound of mosquitoes, grasshoppers, and ducks lull me into a trance. I daydream about what this place looked like before the condos, pavement, and power lines and feel a sort of comfort in this exercise. I might unwittingly sit here for an hour. I find satisfaction in that kind of time, too.
I feel inclined to share an excerpt of my short story “River Dream,” which was published in Islandia Journal’s first volume (Spring 2021). The protagonist, an architect who oversees luxury development projects, is working late and falls into a dream which morphs into something else/more.
I use the dream space to comment on the history of development in the Everglades and to reflect on how our relationship to earth mirrors our relationship to ourselves (and vice versa). This story reminds me to challenge the contemporary narrative of ‘man vs. nature’ and to imagine more relational, less human-centric possibilities.
If you would like to read the entire story, let me know. For being a part of my online community, I’m happy to share a PDF with you!
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One night, I was huddled over my MacBook revising floor plans in AutoCAD, flooded with emails and text messages about the project, when I came down with a fever. I cracked my bedroom window open for fresh air and laid in bed, attempting to sleep. The soft static of grasshoppers outside seemed to sharpen into distinct whispers and suddenly, my mattress was moving. The lapping noises and humidity around me suggested I was drifting along in a body of water.
In my delirium, I had the urge to grab my phone and call for help, but the screen was shattered, and I couldn’t move or speak. I couldn’t even remember words, only sensations and forms that I began to make out as my eyes adjusted to the dark. Moonlight poured into a dense canopy of trees on the horizon. As I drew closer, a silhouetted figure emerged. She was crowned and wore a blue cloak. In her hands, she clasped a scroll. She was silent as she stepped onto the helm of my bed, but I understood her name to be Marjie.
We didn’t speak, yet I could hear her voice in my head. She said she came from a river of grass so vast and perfect and timeless that it had been forgotten. She saw the cracked screen of my phone and started chuckling to herself. “What is real to you?” Marjie asked. For a moment, everything was pixelated. Images hung above our heads like clouds: illustrated floor plans, text messages, emails, and even a photo of a sunset over the bay I had taken one evening.
Suddenly, my laptop was in her hands. Its screen was shattered too. Each black shard reflected an image of her face. The images above us disappeared and we shrunk into the screen, the cracks turning into streams that fed into a lake filled with brown reeds and sawgrass. Mosquitoes buzzed over the water’s surface. Languid alligators laid about.
“Behold this place,” Marjie said. “Look onto it as you would a mirror and look very deeply. What would you call this?”
The word ‘swamp’ came to my mind and Marjie laughed. The water beneath us evaporated, revealing a rocky material. The dark portal of my past dreams appeared. An old fear buried in me started rising to my chest. I wanted to cry.
“What you call the ‘swamp’ is but your own darkness, held in contempt,” she said. “Your deepest desires, your wild and true nature, lie in the dark. You play with illusions and projections — what do you call that? AutoCAD? Revit? I can’t keep up — and design your fancy structures to tame the wilderness, the unknown. You build walls and dig canals around your heart, uncertain of how to navigate the depths of its waters. You would rather slay beasts of your own imagination, deeming the reptilian brain an enemy.”
I couldn’t tell if she was still talking to me. Her gaze shifted from amused to solemn.
“As you build these obstacles, your inner pain grows, rising in your throat until it forces itself to be heard. It howls and wails and floods all in its path, while you look on with horror at the damage, like you didn’t see it coming. What is the ‘swamp’ but a word reflecting the neglected parts of yourself? Can you see the natural beauty of this ancient place? Can you stand with your chest open to the face of the sky? Can you accept your place in the Big Water? Can you feel how all things flow from the heart and remember the softness of the earth? Look — even the rock here is porous.”
We started to move toward another portal in the ground, illuminated like an exit. I started to panic. Darkness closed in. I could sense this dream was coming to an end and I was overcome with the desire to steal the scroll from Marjie’s hands. I wanted to remember her message, remember where we were. I suddenly lunged at her, seizing the scroll, but when I opened it, the page was blank. Marjie just laughed and laughed.
“You won’t find what you’re looking for there. You only have to walk outside, close your eyes to feel the naked knowing in your bones, under your skin, in your heart. You belonged in this place long before you could think. The grass, the palm trees, the water, the sunlight and the storms are parts of a wild and ancient language. Can you remember?”
With gratitude,
Kristen
~
