Origin Story

Whales used to be wolves you know? That’s why they travel in packs. It would take them centuries to learn their navigation songs. The bulbs on their brains would grow in unison with the oceanic howls, a slow but steady restructuring of mind and breath. Twas the lack of pressure from land that would allow their tails to become grand in the space of the vast ocean. Predator to protector, nevertheless the sea mammal’s pelvic bone used to flap its blubbery fluke is the remnant of a prehistoric dog’s hairy hind leg.

The cactus is just a rose given time and space to become life in the desert. Thorns would travel from the West Indies across the Western Hemisphere and over 18,000 years that little flower would become a statue stronger than sand. A blossom that danced across half the world to learn how to find the deepest drop of water. Cacti self soothe, provide shelter, they are gutted open and burnt on. She dons a coat of spines that protects herself from all the elements but those who open her with care. And if nopales cure everything, is that because their genesis of a rose has the meaning of love?

Knowledge is a ripple, we must all do our evolving part to carry on its flow. I met a curious man who lowered a cactus into the ocean. He hooked it to a device that simultaneously recorded sounds of the underwater world alongside amplifying the vibrations of the plant’s own genetic melody. Life probed the little green needled terrestrial, first came the small fish then the bigger fish until porpoise and lastly whales. Like a whole entire chain of conversation from smallest to biggest, expanding like a web of wisdom. A shared language neither you nor I have access to.

But what would one say to the whale and desert rose? Here I am, human, swinging on ropes of neural connections from tree to tree in my brain. I don’t know if I descended from the oxygen producing microbes that once heated Paleoproterozoic earth into mass extinction. But I know that there are more bacteria in my stomach than stars in the sky. At one point as an organism I was equipped with the instincts to sniff chemical substances and decide either approach or avoid. Yet now I am built to smell parts per trillion so deciphering is not so easy when I can detect the lingering smell of a lover after they have filled me with their germs.

Being a person is to be covered with filth, to have an appetite that has an insatiable drive for pleasure and patterns. Consistently linked to everything I come in contact with, I too feel marked all the time almost as if life is a consistent process of adapting to one's environment. Somewhere between scenting the world out and developing a more sophisticated software I was given a cortex that I carry like a crown. It commands that even in all my slimy glory I am hard wired for feeling. Thousands of ancestors for me to be born a romantic rotting machine.

Could he hear over the whale tail I wore on my hips that I held my breath to unabashedly sing a song that says here I am in the dark? It was more than just a moan, but a mellifluous admission. I wasn’t always like this, able to swim deep and survive. That it was me who chewed off my own arm to escape a land-locked fate. In its place I grew a fist-shaped heart that points like a compass so that I can propel through the icy uncharted and somehow always find the surface. Dive in every time knowing that I might not see the evolution of the risk, yet wanting more space to be held for me so that I might be more than just a wet bitch.

In that rose garden in the morning in that big city on that little island. The buds gather a certain dew that cools my skin like walking through that cactus mine in the sunset in that small town in that big state. The place where a dance of four steps forward two steps back began. A succulent disposition that tried something new- being brave enough to touch aridly-avoidant soil. Consistently both spurned and desired for the same medicine I provide, yet still I stand tall with conviction. Might my inclination to pirouette no matter where I am, my rhizomatic feelings that poke, and my written words that petal be taken seriously if they were the traces of an origin story ?