The Boneyard

May 4, 2013 I participated in the "Interesting Gorge" event in Mosier, OR.  When invited to speak I was fresh off an inspiring weekend at the coast and was feeling brave. Ha!  Then the terror kicked in. What did I have to offer a room of several hundred people. What was I thinking?!!!  But I had been contemplating the ideas discussed below and felt so passionately about them I didn't care if I sounded a little crazy.  I saw it through and was stunned by the response. Weeks after the event people I didn't know would still come up to me in the grocery store with kind comments about my talk.  I have come to the conclusion that when one speaks an authentic truth, people respond.  So I kept writing. And then some poetry started flowing out of my pen and again people, especially lovely, powerful women I admired, responded. The floodgate appears to have opened. And so, in the words of Cheryl Strayed, I started to "write like a motherfucker".  For what it's worth, I share it here. 

May 4, 2013

Over the last 5 years I have fallen in love with the Oregon coast.  

I love the gray, the wet, the rocks, the grit, the smell, the taste. . . 

There is a particular spot I return to over and over again. 

It’s a rocky area near Seaside’s cove that covers many acres.  

I return visit after visit and love exploring the nooks and crannies. 

It is different every day – 

four times daily in truth – 

I never know what the last tide will have washed in - 

or out.

But the day I came face to face with a dead seal I began to look differently at what I’ve affectionately come to know as The Boneyard.

As I watched that seal slowly decompose over the better part of a year, 

I began to notice all the other remains in The Boneyard . . . 

shells that used to house sea creatures, snails, bird skulls,  wings . . . 

and then I started thinking about the floats and baskets and entire trees and ropes and fishing lines and lighters and toothbrushes and syringes . . . 

and it began to seem that this was a place of endings. 

Even the rocks and driftwood began to look like bones.

This brought to mind one of the teachings of Buddhist nun, Pema Chodron - 

the ‘charnel ground practice’. 

In some areas of Tibet the ground is too frozen to bury the dead, 

so they cut the bodies into small pieces and leave them at the charnel ground for birds and animals of prey to scavenge. 

This place can be very frightening and uncomfortable . . . 

eyeballs, hair, fingers and bones are scattered everywhere. 

The monks living nearby go to these grounds to sit and meditate, getting in touch with the discomfort and their fears. 

It isn't just about sitting with the fear, but learning to regard whatever arises as the very energy of wisdom. 

In Pema’s words, it allows us to “look at our propensity to be bothered and our lifelong efforts at avoiding that which bothers us.”

So I started looking at my Boneyard as a sort of charnel ground with the opportunity to contemplate the sometimes messy, violent and uncomfortable endings  . . . 

seals oozing away to a pile of scattered bones . . . 

birds that look like an explosion of bone and feathers . . .  

strands of kelp and seaweed that looked like entrails, 

the silent remains of a campfire,. . . 

my own broken heart . . .

and somewhere along the way the awfulness faded away to a strange kind of beauty . . .

 the sand dollar perfect in its brokenness. 

The endings became new beginnings . . . 

whether a dead body providing nourishment for another creature, 

a sad little lost red shovel that will bring joy to the kid who finds it,

the mossy, spring green slug moving slowly past the remains of its cousin’s abandoned snail shell,

 brilliant green plant seedlings magically appearing out of the dead looking sand . . .

And the constancy amongst all that living and dying is the Ocean’s unending waves. 

The waves that carry these treasures in to shore. 

The waves that carry them all back out again.  

All in her good time. 

All to her own rhythm. 

Every six hours.  

Without fail. 

I have grown to love this place.

 It’s where I will live someday. 

It’s where my ashes will be scattered. 

I want to always be part of this beautiful cycle. 

I recently came across the following passage, written by Terry Tempest Williams in her book “When Women Were Birds”.  I don't think I could express it any better:

“ . . . it is here I must have fallen in love with water, recognizing its power and sublimity, where I learned to trust that what I love can kill me, knock me down and threaten to drown me with its unexpected wave. If so, then it was also here where I came to know I can survive what hurts. I believed in my capacity to stand back up and run into the waves again, no matter the risk."