The water’s edge is patchy, ragged, ever-shifting, full of temporalities. I walk along Australia’s Bondi Beach navigating this unruly line between ocean and land: a boundary full of entanglements, fabulist in its intermingling of ephemerality and immutability. Other humans and non-humans gather at this periphery between two worlds, each of them managing the space in their own way: fearfully, delightedly, or purposefully. Those who delve deeper into the waves give themselves over to a position of precariousness, where the ocean dictates their movements, their safety, their provisional stability.
I admire them as I tiptoe cautiously towards the horizon, sinking deeper into the water until my feet no longer touch bottom. I tell my mind, “let go,” put faith in my ability to float and a strange new domain. I look around, trying to grasp the contours of this environment. I marvel: from where I have been gently swayed by the current I can see neither shore nor nearby swimmers. There are no trails to guide me anywhere, no buoys to plot a course. It’s just me levitating in endless liquid. No progress. No linearity. No future. I quell the momentary panic, sigh, and gaze up. It’s the closest I’ve gotten to being in the moment, lately.
What if I could center this way of thinking? In trying to figure out a life amid economic and environmental ruin, how do I allow vulnerability instead of fear to transform how I behave in this unreliable system?
The beach is a constant state of flux, a give and take between two modes of matter. Landscape is remade through seasonal and epochal cycles, not a singular march forward. Time — for the grains of sand, for the flowing tide — is not measured one-dimensionally, but in slow incalculable motion. There’s no happy ending for a liminality. Within this continuous changeability, nonhumans alter air, water, and earth, creating co-habitats for one another — burrowing homes in the dunes, foraging food using thermal streams, digesting plankton on the ocean floor — without fixed assumptions or destined plans. How can I assemble my existence in such multidirectional patterns?
Back on shore, I listen to the polyphonic symphony of gulls, dogs, humans, and surf. Some would call it a cacophony of cawing, baying, cackling, and pounding. However, though the sounds may be in dissonance, their gathering rhythms remind me of our shared planet, our shared attempts at life-building. Bird, dog, ground, human, water — we are all in perpetual encounters with one another, giving and receiving in numerous ways intentionally and accidentally. There is no self-sufficiency. There is no clear-cut analysis of who is winning or losing.
If I persist in the fantasy of autonomous survival and decision-making, then I will perpetuate the harm caused by systems of extraction and acquisition. The happenings at Bondi beach, the way compositions coalesce and disassemble, teaches me there is no grand equation to flourishing. Rather, it’s about paying attention to the big and small, the center and peripheral, the order as well as the chaos. And then, like the terns maneuvering between land and water using drafts or the shore itself slipping positions, I can respond to chance, interaction, collaboration, and indeterminacy with coordination and open imagination.
TRAVEL NOTE: “Blakwork,” by Gomeroi poet Alison Whittaker is an autobiography of a different nature. Blending prose and poetry with satire and reportage, this book examines our relationship to ourselves and the land we come from.