Shorelines, or What The Water Said

This week’s pieces is a collection of vignettes—reflections on water, travel, and landscape—in celebration of eight years since starting and sustaining Odette Press on a road trip from East Coast to West. To everyone who has connects, supports, and be a part of this journey, thank you. You help this effort continue, and it means so much to be to be able to make this work, sewing journals, teaching workshops, writing, and diving into the nature of ink on water. To support this work, become a paid subscriber, pair your creative practice with a journal, or sign up for upcoming workshops in person in Chicago, and flow with creativity together this season.

Lakeshore, Driving

Night begins as the whisper thin crescent rises, glowing orange, glimmers of gold against the evening. Then emerge into morning. Feel how a drive shifts, and you become buoyant across terrain, mind and body at rest, following along curves and contour of the city near the lake that cups this city. Milkweed unfurls in daylight, by oak, by catalpa, by grasses that sway in the wind. Turquoise becomes your view, your rhythm, your cadence, this Great Lake seen close, expanding out into distance.

Midcoast, Maine

That same iridescence I noticed on a drive one summer in Maine. Belfast, Maine overlooks the water. A sigh comes as the mouth of the Passagassawakeag River opens and spits you into converging points of the Belfast and Penobscot Bay. That August I had been camping, sleeping under stars at night, studying ink, immersed beside water. I drove that morning, north, toward the hope of a campsite at Acadia, but not before being stopped—stunned— by morning light and atmosphere on water. In the distance, fog rose, as if painted thick across the morning. I parked the car, sat on the sand, and dug feet, brushes, and ink, into ground.

What did daylight say? That morning I sat to listen, immersed by solace, silt, and sand, surrounded by sounds of water, noticing gray blue distance of the fog laden bay and colors of undulating light across that soft Maine morning. Ink floating on water tells you a continual story of surrender, one where you understand where the point of ink may begin, but not always where it ends. That morning I soaked up stillness, and sat by the shoreline watching the movement of gulls, families, early morning fishing boats, and waves that brought up offerings of shell and stone and seaweed, until heat came and burned off my attention span. Sunlight, opening into fullness, was an encouragement up and back to the car; I continued momentum north, and drove again.

The night after, arriving to Acadia, I’d camped, cooking by embers of fire. In the pan blueberries became black as ink, sweet and dark, darkening, hot, dissolving, melting, transforming into something new, a deepening blue. From a notebook: “The air here is cool and clear, so far north, away from the Mid Atlantic haze. Midcoast, they call it— Rockland, Rockport, Camden. Last night as I drove up and down Route 1 a blanket of fog appeared, densely coating the highway, the side streets, the street lamps, making driveways and turns and oncoming cars appear suddenly. So hard to see. This morning when I woke, both sun and the fog were fighting for space, sunlight weaving its rays between the tendrils of mist, intertwining warmth with water, with the trees’ trunks, with the moss and the low lying ferns.”

Chicago, Summer

Still, night sky and lake endures. Last week, sitting by the lake at night, I hear the distant sound of metal clacking a steady cadence, humming up against side of boats floating past. Inward, and toward the city, water pushes upward toward night sky in a continual momentum. Eyes tune in toward the crescent horizon, orange red and purple glow of changing lights spread out as if waves on water were embers, lights refracting off the surface near Buckingham Fountain.

Flow out of your apartment and into the evening, the thick summer air seemed to say. By the pulse of lake, I watch people pushing carts, offering the sweet, cold relief of ice cream. Children rip through space, a race run toward a bush and back, their moments all speed and laughter, leaving atmospheres of their joy left behind them, as if trails of light, transcending time. All while, all around, otherwise is the peace that comes and rises in the thick of heat. Families sit, arms around each other, watching traffic, the crowds, the lake. Couples walk, hand in hand, traversing terrain of city, each other, conversation.

Big Sur At Sunset

Days later, memory rises with daylight, and I recall the edges of the continent. The point where water, breath, land, and fire meet is the place where the sun lives, repeating its song of endurance.

I close my eyes. I feel and see a distant glow of gold orange sunset blazing full then fading into that vast ocean balanced on the edge of the world, as the Pacific swells, deep blue in memory. Big Sur at sunset is the point where waves lap up on soft sands, where small islands of sediment sit as landmasses and sentinels, still, and steadfast against ocean. Mountains dissolve into sand; time compresses colors and textures of turquoise, gold, ground, deep ocean blue, bright sky, and worn green down, into the intensity of experience.

To view earth at the convergence of water and sky brings you to both edges of thinking or feeling and to landscape, and I stood, perched, stilled, in awe and silence, watching water from the cliff, looking into the ocean waving unending in that distant, deep blue indigo, as almost-black as ink or night. Wind will call across your ears, sing between your arms, and tell you of the edges of your existence, shifting the hairs on the terrain of your arms. I felt for the landscape there below my feet, at length of fingertips, into the places where sagebrush and grass fade and dry all summer in the sun on this cliff side, quivering in the breeze as day dissolved into evening—the same wind that made tides, to making waves on the depths of ocean below, extending out to the point where horizon held up a pink lilac and fading orange sunset, reaching yellowed light up into eyesight.

Later that night, welled up with sun, time, and anticipation, I pulled in to the ranger station at Pfieffer Big Sur State Park

Southwest to East and What The Water Said

Weeks later, I drove toward the Atlantic. I crossed the desert again, as if the cross point of two stitches. I drove into the desert pink sky, all blush and into the air of nostalgia. I drove into the moon.

Open heart, open road, open sky—a sentence that drove through me, held in heart, mind, hand as if stone, water, poem, talisman.

Of A Dream

Water, ground, sky’s light, lakeside. What do each have to say? I sat shoreside by the ocean at night in Maryland, or daylight in Maine. I sat in rivers in summer, and looked to the Pacific for answers, painting ink with breath across a water bath. All breathed into me to look within.

In a notebook, a wrote the edges of a dream: “I drove to the same vague landscape: down the winding path at dusk, with what felt like an abundance of sea kelp and seaweed on the big dirt piles flanking the winding road. I went there to watch the sunset. I went back at night, too. Felt like White Sands, plus the landscape of Maine.” What I learned as I found a rhythm those years with driving was that each road had a story, and told in sound, sense, and shape, if I could pause enough to listen. That each body of water reminded me of life, now living as a story within me, waves that welled up, encouraging living.

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Reading Winter Count by Barry Lopez. Finding rhythm on a run, in sleep, and in nighttime city walking.

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