There is a place where the big rivers meet the sea, the estuary: vast fanning mud flats, beds of grasses, sedge, rushes and reeds.
Brackish edges that meet many beings’ needs. Inter tidal, liminal, ecotonal, rich with the food of transition, the food of exchange, the food of intersection, the generative, dark stink of rot and growth.
We lay back in the lumpy bent over grass knolls of the dry mad flats, where the rushes rippled like fur on a giant cat’s back. She carried us under the caress of warm winds and the flight of Swallow and Eagle. We pulled up to taste fresh tender shoots of Cattail, our nails filling with mud, our hearts stilling and swelling. As the dry stalks and leaves rustled wisely and the Red-Winged Blackbirds rang out their song; the blue rock hills stood in ancient, quiet vigil. A few fluff strands of seed, still holding on and fluttering on the ends of these straight, strong and ultra-light rods.
We walked through knee and thigh-high grasses, following faint trails of who? Human? Elk? Someone else? Spotted a plant that looked like Mallow: Marsh Mallow? Nootka Rose, Indian Plum, Red Osier, Nettle, at least two kinds of Blackberry and others stretched out their offerings to us: take me carefully, learn my ways, give back. The brackish smells re-membered us back to an old, old seasonal home, a gathering place we all surely know in our bones.
The estuary: a crossroads, where the great rivers meet the sea. Rich muds and marshes, a generating of age-old cultures of understanding, baskets of civilization, clay tablets of symbol-making. The estuary: transitional, transformational zones where the soft and hard waters meet, where peoples have gathered for eons to weave baskets and relationships with ever shifting seasons of giving and taking. Not so much anymore, as many of these fertile valleys where great rivers meet the sea have been built over, turned into ports, filled in. The rich exchange of wild food, life and death that humans have been part of for a very long time is not so fresh in our minds. Until we go there, stand there, smell the salt and hear the warm winds.
What do these places have to tell us about holding opposites together? About intersections? About places where birth and death feed life? What if we never ever see one, never lie back where the long rushes sway like the fur on a giant cat’s back? What if we never learn about how Salmon fry make it from the gentle soft waters to the sting of salt? What if we never hear the cry of the Red-Winged Blackbird and get that rich black under our fingernails pulling out fresh shoots?
My two friends walked off into the vast salty wind and left me to my quiet senses.
What a profound delight to be a human in such a place with the warm winds of time rippling the long rushes, with the wild Roses and Cattail nodding their heads: you belong, you belong, they seem to say.
These sensations tumbled out as I realized, I’d never been in an estuary before. I wove a wee basket with Cattail and rush, and ask my fingers worked the green fibres, I remembered the roadside ditch bordering wet lands on the way up to Anderson Lake where along with others I gathered Cattail for the first time. I remembered reading Robin Wall Kimmerer’s chapter about the abundance and usefulness of this plant in Braiding Sweet Grass. I remembered the first time I was invited to twine cordage from it’s long, strong fibres into a bracelet at the Art of Mentoring. I remembered the first time I zipped up a Cattail seed head, like a long brown sausage into the side pocket of my backpack because someone said it was helpful to for fire starting, only to have the fluffy seeds explode out some months later. I remembered when I first learned about Red Winged Blackbirds and how they build their nests in between the long, strong Cattail stalks using the soft fluff from the seed heads to cushion their young, and the first time I actually saw this in the wild. I remember going back to Science World with my students, and realize that both I and they now had direct real life experience of this wild knowledge, and that the plastic models paled in comparison.
All, of this came back, as I twisted the plant fibres, weaving a small basket. My heart filled with gratitude.
My two friends brought me here after we’d left a small gathering of friends on the land, circling around fire, song, wild crafts, deepening our quest of what to do, how to live, how to bridge the world of taking and taking with and old world returning, of reciprocity. It’s hard to leave such vibrant gatherings and return to my solitary, urban life.
I can’t think of a more sacred way to honour this transition, than to spend a couple of hours in an estuary, where the great river spreads it’s fingers into the ocean, where the soft waters meet the salty, where the rushes and reeds sing with the loving whispers of the ancients.
It’s happening, they say, you remember. You’ll find a way.
I left the little green basket there rocking in the wind, walked off through the thigh high rushes and sedges, thirsty for Blackberries and Rose petals, to rejoin my friends.
You can watch some footage over here on my insta @thetwiningtrail
Thank you as ever for reading. Most of all for my father who taught me how to step off the beaten path and lay back in the tall grasses, and to my mother who taught me to pay attention to plants and tell good stories.
Stay tuned for #4
4 more days of consecutive writing! Woah, discipline to craft is exciting! Oh, and shall we tie ourselves together? Subscription is free, comments are flirty, engagement blows life into my fire.
warmly and wildly,
Belinda White on The Twining Trail
Sweet to join you midway through your 7 days of writing. I loved listening and learning about the liminal space of estuary. As I sit very near the Fraser River, I wonder what it's union w the Salsih Sea looks like.
I’m in southern Brittany, a place so full of wild, and estuary, edge and ancestors. I wove a small charm of plantain stalks. A egret has just wandered by. I love your words x