Everywhere debris that made me;

Wading into the water, sun hot on my skin, the reflection of clouds and sky on its surface didn't reveal the currents and life forms swarming underneath. Maybe the moon similarly reflects the sun's light, a diversion that keeps its intentions and secret lives hidden from being known.

An astrologer explained to me once that since my moon (our emotional life) sits practically on top of my rising sign (what you present to the rest of the world) - both of which I have in Leo, ruled by the Sun, the Father Principle - then often my encounters and relationships face a confusion at their core: others will often see their own light reflected back at them, their own desires, priorities and truths, insecurities and fears, and that inability to see past their own reflection means I don't get seen at all.

Sometimes it is an immensely useful circumstance.

A book I read a long time ago described a telltale sign of a witch - when a man can see his own reflection in her eyes. A man can drown in his own reflection, and she knows that, was born with that knowledge. There is no truer love spell.

When Odysseus lashed himself to the mast of his ship and had his sailors plug their ears with beeswax, he was seeking to bear witness to the song of the Sirens without meeting his demise, and he found they too sing of the glory of whoever's ear receives those sounds. As men clamor towards visions of their glorious futures - they drown in it, are consumed by it.

Therapists and parents provide the mirrors we need to be able to see ourselves clearly as we develop a sense of identity and moral grounding, but my mother could only see herself and her needs when she looked at my face. Everyone's face, actually. Like Narcissus, we are all reflective pools for her to get lost in, an ocean of moons in orbit around her desires.

I met a man recently whose presence could almost seem innocuous, if it weren't for gentle, specific questions that seem to fall innocently from his mouth. It took me awhile to realize they were arrows, because I couldn't ever see what he was aiming at. There was no heat of judgement, or clearly discernable facial reactions to give away his thoughts or feelings, and I watched myself unspool in front of him. I listened to the things I allowed myself to say as we worked together, and I started to see the character I play in my life, the stories that I have clung to as definitions of self, I let emotions bubble to the surface that would normally never see the light, and I voiced them for his silent consideration.

I'd met another mirror.
Turns out we were born on the same day.

I usually have such easy access to other people's emotions that I wasn't sure how to respond at first. I tried a few different approaches - being expressive and searching for clues in his body language - then being blunt and straight forward - I even pried gently a few times, but he dismissed most of my attempts to peel back his reflective armor. I'm still bothered and I'm not sure why. Maybe because I don't know what character he is meant to play yet. Or maybe I've anchored myself with a sense of control over everything around me, so the unknowable is naturally disconcerting. Maybe I don't know who I am when I'm not being someone's mirror - I know how badly I want to be seen, known for who I am, but I can't assume he desires the same.

The tide pulls me in, coaxed by the moon, and the undertow tugs me out. Back and forth, rocked by the ocean. Micro-currents and vegetation caress every single part of my body with equal force and focus, as well as complete indifference and no hungry expectation, I know myself along all of those surfaces, wrapped in informative sensation about my unique volume and texture, sculpted by those fingers reaching shoreward and back again. This is how I always want to be held, received as what I am, no more and no less. The ocean doesn't seem confused by me. But human hands have always seemed too focused on very specific parts of me, and I am confused as to why anyone would touch those delicate places with the kind of relentless lack of care that they would never use to touch my face, the hollow of my back, the soles of my feet.

I doubt the ocean is pretending to be the sky, or that the moon has a deep fear of being misunderstood. But humans are full of stories, and maybe I play a mirror in the movie of my life as a way of being the thing that I need because I don't trust anyone else to do it, and maybe I touch others with the insistent gentleness I crave - since it means in some small way that I am being touched back, that my hands on someone's body is a two way street, and their skin might yearn towards me subtly, beyond their awareness.

Wading out of the surf, waves coalesce into foam around me, the sand melts away under the sturdiness of my footsteps. It is so easy to forget myself in the ebb and flow of other people's stories, but in the gentle indifference of the water, everything I don't need is washed away, and clarity is all that's left. I know my birthright as I wring water from my hair and a faint salt crust sparkles on my sun-warm skin.

I will wear that salt as long as I can.





Aphrodite is consistently portrayed, in every image and story, as having had no childhood.


In the most famous version of her myth, her birth was the consequence of a castration: Cronus severed Uranus' genitals and threw them behind him into the sea. The foam from his genitals gave rise to Aphrodite (hence her name, meaning "foam-arisen"), while the Erinyes (furies), and the Meliae emerged from the drops of his blood. Hesiod states that the genitals "were carried over the sea a long time, and white foam arose from the immortal flesh; with it a girl grew." The girl, Aphrodite, floated ashore on a scallop shell.


Aphrodite's husband Hephaestus is one of the most even-tempered of the Hellenic deities, the god of blacksmithing/ironwork.

I came from crocodile mouths. I swam thru the bronx of my mother's belly.

Beach bound on a Sunday, Church day, for baptism by salt water and I was trepidatious. After three intense years of growth and focus on a very urban landscape, and very urban realities, I had fearfully avoided making the trek to NYC's beaches alone, unwilling to dispel the illusions of my childhood in perfect water and soft white sand. That coastline is ever in my thoughts, so contrasted by my daily life, even a recent vicious hurricane couldn't permeate the concrete membrane that separates the city from the earth, and left us practically unscathed while entire mountain towns around us melted and washed away. I never really understood homesickness, but have often felt the pull of far distant tides and the kind of release of total trust that I would never allow myself in my daily war for respect and knowledge from the people stacked up in this city with me. Closing the car door,  I had to actively reconstruct my atrophied beach sensibilities, insecurities of surrendering the white of my flesh to exposure from the elements and the eyes of the person on the blanket next to me, and once in the water, about rolling with the swells instead of fighting them, the pressing nature of reality pulling and choking and breathing around me, like being inside a much larger organism. And in the smack and flow, I had to re-find the rhythm, the pulse that beats through my own veins, that I had been to busy to pay attention to, the cacophony of other people's needs was lost in the white noise of the waves and gull cries, and quite possibly, for the first time in three years... I could feel myself breathe.

My partner in crime dragged out a body board, and I found myself attempting to navigate the waves from above, something I had never bothered with, and giggling and screeching with the seven-year-olds around me on their boards, I became acquainted with a nuance I had never before paid much mind to - how different it is to be on top of the waves, rather than immersed in them. The strength of the pull up into a budding wave, and the force that carries you on top and then crashing solidly and swiftly into the sand is so different than the rolling punching surge in the underbelly of the wave, that catches you unaware and senseless, unable to avoid the body parts or sea life caught in the motion with you. Later, as the tide crept back in, pulling with it decaying crab bodies and seaweed, a helicopter circled overhead, and a police boat chased shadows in the waves. When I asked a passing vehicle with a couple of nonchalant beach cops what was up, I was informed they were searching for a body. A quiet malevolence seemed to surface, reality rushing in with the tide, wrapping itself around me like the sting of the sunburn spreading down my thighs, a painful reminder that even the sun will do us harm, as it nourishes and sustains us.

After my first pilgrimage to the ocean, I decided to try a more urban accessible path to a closer beach, taking my roommate and the subway, in the hopes that I might find a place I could run to on a whim. I had heard the Rockaways were beautiful, but with a belligerent wind and painfully strict swimming boundaries from insistent lifeguards, it was ominous at best. Stealing myself to the water's edge, by the time it was licking and pushing at my calves I was frozen in place, almost unable to bring myself any further in. Late as it was in the day, I found myself once again greeted by the tide, and all the human and oceanic refuse slapping and sticking to my thighs, being drawn shoreward on a sour sweet smelling wind, with only a hint of brine in its odor. Reality and horror filled me down to the core of my being, I could feel my body stutter in its motion towards the pounding surf and come to a panic-filled stop. Chunks of wrappers and bizarre flat paperlike plant matter swirled around me, and my mind was flooded with images of the ganges river, the masses that bathed themselves and their clothing and animals in the polluted waters, other abused and corrupted natural sources of water that were slightly unreal images in history classes from grade school, of the sea life that breathed and lived in this, how only damaged and mutated genes could survive in the monumental funk, that toxicity would only beget more defensive toxicity in a desperate attempt to survive...

And the the shame I felt was quite possibly the deepest I have ever experienced, my revulsion so intense it felt like a rejection of my roots, of the deepest truths at the core of my being. I was bearing witness to the desecration of the womb from which we all clamored out of, it was no longer far past my peripherals, it is here, and it is real. With a childhood that was comprised of watery memories woven and fed to me by deceitful adults, the disappearing of a weak and lazy father figure, tarot cards on my mother's bed and conch shells and coral in the corners of the bathroom and nooks and crannies of windows, I had always sought a sense of the psuedo mother figure in the shores of my childhood, since I could touch and define its truth, its pervasive sense of reality. Abrasive and temperamental, it burned and bruised without apology, scrubbed me clean of impurities and connected me to something larger, almost omnipresent and rooted me to my sense of self.

Now, in what seems to be a perpetual coming of age, as all my deepest beliefs are being tested and redefined, the ocean continues the shattering of my deepest childlike perceptions. Circumstance like a tidal wave is battering everything I have ever used to define myself and my reality, and when the floodwaters drain away, I only wonder what will be left after the deluge, what will still be rooted, who it will be standing in my place, and whether or not she will still have my sassy grin.