It Felt Defiant, Primal, Necessary

The river continues to flow.

Hello Beautifuls,

I am humbled and thrilled by the community gathering here, at each new subscriber and each person who’s been with me along the way.

My most fervent dream is to write things that feel impossible for me to hold on my own, in the hopes that whatever I say finds its way to someone else who needs to hear it.

The art of writing, I am coming to learn, is not to be good or perfect, but to be true — to ourselves and to the stories that need to be told.

You, lovely reader, are the one who makes this whole thing work. So thank you. The deepest places in my soul are grateful to you.

The driftwood sculpture we built, Santa Cruz, CA.

You know what I've been praying for lately? Hope.

Not the kind of hope that comes when you want a raise or to be chosen for a job, a school, a raffle. Not the kind of hope when you want someone to notice your great outfit, or you want an empty seat next to you on the plane instead of someone with a wet and tortured cough.

The kind of hope I've been praying for is God-sized hope. That is to say, I don't want to drink it politely from a straw, I want to open up the faucet and let it gush from the hose so that I can slurp it up, pour it on my head, bathe in the deliciousness of it.

I saw some images from the Oscars yesterday. The talking heads said some women were too much (read: Pamela Anderson without makeup), some were too little (read: very thin Demi Moore and Ariana Grande).

There is no just-right for how we're supposed to look, how we're supposed to be seen. No Goldilocks moment where women can sit down with a sigh of relief and say, "There. Now I am allowed to want what I want, to eat enough, to get old, to get tired, to wear out of use to men and therefore become, finally, glorious to myself."

There are rules for women, namely don't be too much or too little, but the target is always moving, so there's never a chance we'll get it right. Maybe that's what I'm praying for too–that one day, women get a break. That one day, women get to put down the Botox and the diets, the workouts and the self loathing, the endless need to be other than we are, and be the goddesses we've always been: the powerhouses of love and rage, compassion and fire, desire and creation–without comment or apology.

I am not holding my breath. But I am willing to hope. And I am willing to make choices that serve me and my goddess self, not the patriarchy.

MaryCatherine McDonald reminded me yesterday of the power of choice and hope over fear when she asked:

“Did you know, when we recognize even the smallest choices available to us, the brain’s hope circuit lights up? And then by necessity, the fear circuit goes dim.

No matter how stuck or trapped we feel, identifying options - however small - creates a big big psychological shift.

Hope thrives on possibilities. So do we.”

Saturday before last, when I was still in California, my brother-in-law and I drove down the coast from Half Moon Bay to Santa Cruz. He and I are good at being in nature together, at wandering and exploring what calls to us without a need to serve the other or fill the silence with conversation, though we're good at conversation too.

If one drives straight through down Highway 1, it takes about an hour. We took more. Much more. We pulled over and looked down 400-foot cliffs and watched birds ride the updrafts. We walked along headland trails, talked to elephant seals sunning on rocks and sifted through a beach made entirely of small pebbles. We even found some shaped like candy and placed them on our tongues, just to see what it felt like.

To me, it felt defiant, primal, necessary.

We got to Santa Cruz by mid afternoon, the warmest part of the day, when the sun has had time to dry and warm the top layer of winter sand. When, if you are brave or silly or compelled, or all of the above, it is the best time to go swimming. We dropped our things by a huge log and ran, whooping, into the waves.

After, we built a driftwood sculpture. We moved the biggest logs together and while my brother-in-law worked on the central part of the structure, I worked on something I'd seen at a beach farther up the coast—a tail of sorts, or a spine, where one large branch, lower to the ground, supports several smaller, shortish branches in an odd-even pattern, the sticks laid consecutively up the large branch, alternating sides, so that from a few paces away, it looks something like the spine of an animal.

I have camped, built bonfires, run, napped, argued, broken up, played with dogs, cried, prayed, grieved and gotten married on the beach, but I have never, in my 30-odd years of living close to or on the beach, built a driftwood sculpture.

What immediate joy. What tactile and physical delight. What unsupervised and unplanned play. I think, instead of nap pods and organic snacks, we should start putting sandboxes and piles of building materials in office spaces. Think of the creativity, the collaboration, the physical exertion. It would be like PE for adults.

I know why we don't. We lost our sense of balance somewhere along the capitalism highway. As the song goes, I think we're gonna crash, and even if the doctor is coming, he's only got more poison to sell us and we'll still have to pay him cash.

We finished our sculpture and rested for a minute enjoying its beingness, the sound of the waves, the falling sun. I took some pictures, though they are always a thin stand-in for feet in the sand that is warm on top, cool and wet underneath; hair thick with ocean; and jeans pulled on over skin coated in dried saltwater.

There is never too much time at the beach for me, and never enough. I drove back to Santa Cruz on Tuesday, three days after the trip with my brother-in-law.

The San Lorenzo river flows into the ocean just south of the Santa Cruz boardwalk. During winter storms, sand and debris end up on the beaches and clog the harbor and the outlet of the river into the ocean. Since I was a child, Santa Cruz has used bulldozers to move sand on the beaches closest to the harbor, so that boats can come and go, and the river can continue to flow out into the Pacific.

I had forgotten about this until I saw the bulldozer slowly creeping along the beach, smoothing the sand in wide strips. By the time I arrived in late afternoon, the bulldozer was only a strip or two away from our driftwood sculpture. But our sculpture was still standing! I felt something then, seeing it there on the beach, whole and upright. Something like hope. And something like seeing myself there in this structure, my presence, standing sentinel on the beach, witness to dogs and swimmers, waves and moonlight.

I looked away and drove on, sure the bulldozer would tumble our structure on its next pass.

I found another beach just down the road. I read. I swam. I napped. I watched dogs unleashed run and run and run.

And I thought: maybe play can save us. Maybe joy. Maybe hope.

As I drove back around the water line, through the neighborhood and towards Highway 1, I again passed the beach where we'd built our sculpture. Where I'd lived on, for a few days. The bulldozer was gone, finished with this beach. And yet, there it was, our sculpture, upright, the fish tail missing some sticks, but the rest still solid, standing watch.

I know there is another way. I know many of you know there is another way. Perhaps this is (or will be, because I'm clear it's going to get worse before it gets better) our rock bottom, and from the destruction and casualties this administration will leave in its wake (God, please let them leave) we can build a structure with enough room for everyone.

And this time, we will build it so big, and so strong and so immovable, the bulldozer that is the dark side of humanity will have no choice but to steer around it.

I will even hope that most everyone sees room for themselves inside.

Tall cliffs. The point way way off in the distance, almost obscured by fog, is Pillar Point and just on the other side is Mavericks, the famous big-wave surf break.

I would be grateful if you❤️on this post (or share or restack or comment on it). Substack is no different than other algorithm-based sites and liking this post helps others discover Hello Beautifuls.

I am also always so excited to see a comment come in. To know that something I said resonated enough to elicit a response. It’s hard to explain what a huge gift that is. So if you feel moved to say anything, please do. I will always respond.

For more from MaryCatherine, read her Substack here:

MC McDonald, PhD

.

I swam here my first swim this trip. That’s the Santa Cruz pier to the left and Monterey in the distance.