At Anchor in the Belly of the Beast

Jonah in the Belly of the Fish
By Eugene Ivanov

I was the blood in the water, and Oh!

  It felt so good to run so red.

- From Little Red 

by Ashe Vernon

At Anchor in the Belly of the Beast

There are places where it all comes together. Where sun and moon drag the sea over granite bones of earth, churning it to froth. Where life and death wrestle in an embrace older and more intimate than love. Where we have had the luck to find ourselves.

Where the World Beast may be glimpsed by we, who dwell in her belly.

At such a place. On such a night. We set anchor at the edge of it all.

We'd been trying to round a vast promontory which bends that send of sea into whorl within whorl of turbulent gyre. Nutrients are churned in stately violence to permeate the water column. Life blooms and feasts.

Wind had failed our purpose. A storm was coming, but there was a chance we might sail forward in the rising winds of its advance. We sculled into the growing dark and fog and the lee of the current and set anchor at the fringe of a kelp forest.

And oh - the waters ran red.

The hunters were round about. Whales and porpoise. Sea lions and seals. Otters of both land and sea. These, we could hear by breath and bark and song. And others working the web, inaudible to our ears.

Krill ate plankton who in turn lit the waters in auroral splendor, illuminating the kelp. Fish ate  krill, and were in turn consumed. Each moving thing leaving its trail of fire in the water.

And the birds, awake to this nocturnal gluttony, their excited cries piercing the fog.

We sat on deck in the midst of it all, silenced by Music.

A Music whose bass notes shook us to the core. Whose high notes 'most evade the ear. Whose every voice is sung by the very mouth which feeds. Whose every note choired a harmony unplanned, but resonant beyond human ken.

A Music which calls to our feral selves. To our selves before we sowed the field or built the walls. When we, too, sang our own wild song with our brothers and sisters 'neath the untamed moon.

To our selves before we dreamed we had a self, separate from the World.

*****

But I am a child of civilization, so called. Burdened with the gift of tongues, wagging ceaselessly in my head, I am cut off from direct experience of the World.

A note, or here and there a phrase, are all that is vouchsafed me.

Yet there is a joy in knowing - as perhaps no other animal can - that we are all related. In life. In death. Knowing our own mortality. That predator and prey are but organelles within a greater Beast.

That within our very own guts, legions of flora and fauna are wholly engaged in a microcosm of that give and take of life and death which surged around us that night. In our very cells, predator and prey are merged in symbiotic union. And throughout this ferment - underlying all - life's very cipher flows horizontally, grafting the branches of the Tree of Life.

We may call it struggle, red in tooth and claw. The survival of the fittest and the elimination of the weak. War. Our words hand us only what we know.

We do not yet know that all are One. Always have been.

I, for one, sail to find nights like ours,  in the dark and blood and seethe of Life.

For just a glimpse.