A Discipline of Kindness
There are no monologues in the sea. – Charles Foster
The sea is history. – Derek Walcott
To destroy the sovereignty of a people, you must first destroy their name. – common knowledge
I am at the end of the world and I am praying for whales.
Only it’s not the end of the world, it is just nearing the end of summer.
Only it’s not the end of the world, just the westernmost point of the contiguous United States, Cape Flattery at the tip of Washington State, where my phone thinks I am in Canada, though really, I am on Makah land. I have been living all summer on the Olympic Peninsula, near Indianola, whose true name is not Indianola.
I am at the end of Washington State where the Pacific Ocean, listing endlessly from the western horizon, carries its water through this entrance to Puget Sound.
In nearly every earth-based healing tradition, water is known as a “clear soul liquid.” Meaning, it is a conduit of high vibrational quality. Meaning, it is a pure channel through which information from spiritual realms can sing.
I am praying for whales because I fear I have lost poetry. Meaning, I miss my auntie, the one who was a poet, the one who taught me to turn my daydreams into poems, the one who lived on a cove above the Pacific Ocean filled with kelp beds where humpback whales would come to feed their calves. Every time they swam near, my auntie would say they were coming to visit with me, lonely child that I was. As if I were known.
Grief is a threshold emotion. Meaning, it is an emotion that is actually an altered state of being. Loss wrenches the ground from underneath us. We free float and are tossed through waves of rage, sorrow, betrayal, pain. We may walk through our days as if we are simple bodies walking through our days. In truth, we are adrift on a body much bigger.
S’klallam, Suquamish, Swinomish. The land I have been on all summer.
Last week I watched the Tribes of the Pacific Northwest gather for traditional canoe journeys throughout the Puget Sound, some coming from as far as southeast Alaska. The canoes, holding families, paddle for miles and weeks, asking for permission from the community whose home they are visiting before they disembark on each bank.
This permission asked, this discipline of kindness, opens a fissure the front length of my body. I can feel my insides spilling along the boating docks as they wait to be granted the gift of visiting a place another calls home – this title that makes any place sacred.
~
Humpback whales are the most frequently seen visitors in the Puget Sound. Humpback whales grow to be about 52 feet, weigh 30-50 tons and have a four-chambered heart that weighs about 430 pounds.
The weight of a humpback whale’s heart is about as much as the weight of three average adult human beings.
I am praying for whales because I fear I have lost poetry. Meaning all summer, Black trans women and Indigenous women have been disappeared with casualness. We learn their names only after they are found dead. Then we add it to the numbers.
A canoe lands on the shores of the Suquamish reservation and all the women inside have red handprints painted over their mouths, in protest, in remembrance of the disappeared.
How do we call to those who are refused a name? How do we sing to them? How do we say they are known?
An Igbo proverb says, when a person is given a name, the spirit accepts it. Your name has celestial powers and embodies that spirit.
Two weeks before I am standing on the westernmost tip of the contiguous United States, the Pacific Ocean endless on the horizon, Seattle’s waste management system leaks about 3 million gallons of untreated sewage into the Puget Sound after a failure at the West Point Treatment Plant. For a half-hour, sewage is spilled into the water near North Beach in Discovery Park.
The Suquamish Tribe are known as “The People of the Clear Salt Water.”
The naming ceremonies of Yorubaland, which is part of West Africa, are much more than deciding what to call a child. It is a process of determining the entire destiny of that child, since it is believed that a child eventually lives out the meaning of their name.
My name, Lisbeth, is a variation of Elizabeth, which means “close to God.”
In the naming ceremonies of Yorubaland, an elder presides over the event with 7 symbolic items that are traditionally used to express hope or the path of a successful life. The first symbolic item that the elder presents to the child is water.
Water is everlasting and has no enemies since everything in life needs water to survive. Meaning, the child will never be thirsty in life and no enemy will slow their growth.
Humpback whales are the noisiest and most imaginative whales when it comes to songs. They have long, varied, complex, eerie and beautiful songs that include recognizable squeaks, grunts and other sounds. The songs have the largest range of frequencies used by whales, ranging from 20-90,000 hertz.
Sound travels four and a half times faster in water than it does in air.
My mother’s middle name is Elizabeth, with a z. My sister’s middle name is Elisabeth, with an s.
It is my auntie who teaches me to pour libation. Forms of pouring libation vary widely, but they are intended to acknowledge the contributions and continued spiritual presence of our ancestors. She shows me how to fill a glass with water, then speak into it what we are grateful for, what we hope for the world. I am shy so I whisper into my glass. Then we go outside to the big cedar tree and kneel at the base. She says to call out the name of each person in my family that I remember and to pour a bit of the water into the earth after each one. We call the names of our family members who have passed and those of revered ancestors.
Even if we don’t know their names, she says, we call them relatives and pour.
One famous Japanese researcher and author believed that water can react to positive and negative words or thoughts, and if water is polluted, then it can be cleansed through prayers and positive imagination.
~
As a teenager, I enacted a small but pointed rebellion by changing the spelling of my name from Lizbeth with a z to Lisbeth with an s. Was I trying to hide my true name? Be less like my mother? Closer to my sister? I couldn’t completely divorce myself from the letters tying me to the women of my family. Or maybe, already feeling a vague world of grief in my body, already dreaming of memories not mine, already hoping to somehow be known, I couldn’t completely divorce myself from the way my name kept me close to god.
In cold waters, humpback whales make rough sounds, scrapes and groans, perhaps used for locating large masses of krill. In warm waters, they sing complex songs.
Two summers before the summer I am praying for whales, I am in a ceremony on the islands of South Carolina, home to the Gullah/Geechee for many hundred years. In the ceremony, I am surrounded by Black women, priestesses, and healers. They are pouring water over me. The water has been soaked with flowers and herbs. While they pour the water, they are whispering, speaking, chanting words of blessing. The water mixes with tenderness and my tears. One of the women, Aset, whispers a blessing and smiles. Her cheeks look like my grandmother’s.
My last name, White, comes from my father’s side. His father and his father’s people are Black South Carolinians since the beginning of South Carolina. The name White is most certainly the name of the plantation owner, given to those enslaved on the land.
I am praying for whales because I fear I have lost poetry. Meaning, I am faltering in my tolerance of grief, how long the arc of it stretches across time.
After the ceremony, Aset finds me. We chat and smile, and, noticing each other’s cheekbones, ask “Where are your people from?”
Aset has taken a Kemetic name. Aset’s surname at birth was also White.
Grief is a threshold emotion. Meaning, it is an emotion that carries its own opposite within it. We only experience loss to the degree we experience connection to what we have lost. We only experience the death or passing away of a thing to the degree we have felt its vitality within and vitalness to us. We only experience grief to the degree we have experienced love.
Among the Northern Soho-, Southern Soho-, and Batswana-speaking people in South Africa, a person’s name held immense spiritual power. So much so that it was extremely important to conceal your true name until tremendous trust was built between yourself and another. Only then would your true name be revealed.
S’klallam, Suquamish, Swinomish. My tongue spills the names.
~
I am praying for whales because I fear I have lost poetry. Meaning, I fear I have lost the language that can make beauty out of loss, love out of suffering, reverence out of grief.
It is believed every molecule in water reacts towards the surrounding situation. Therefore, water transmits the information and keeps the memory. A study observed that, when different flowers were dipped in different water jars, every molecule in the droplet of water contained the shape of the flower that was dipped into it.
In June of the summer that I am praying for whales, the Suquamish Tribe announces its intention to sue the U.S. Navy for repeatedly releasing raw sewage into the Puget Sound. According to public records, the Navy discharged hundreds of thousands of gallons of untreated sewage from the Naval Base Kitsap in repeated incidents over the past five years. Some of these spills continued unchecked for weeks, even months. One lasted for more than four years.
Every culture in the world has a ritual for water.
Only the heart the size of a whale can hold grief the size of humanity.
One week before I am standing on the westernmost tip of the contiguous United States, the Pacific Ocean endless on the horizon, praying for a heart the size of a whale’s heart, I have a dream. In the dream, the whales in Puget Sound are suffocating in the waters. In the dream, a woman tells me to bring a jar of water to where the ocean enters the Sound. She tells me to pray into it and make it an offering. But, she says, the water in the jar must be sweet waters, must be freshwater. First, I must go to a mountain waterfall, a very specific one, and ask if I can bring water from the falls to help the waters in the Sound. If the waterfall says yes, I am to collect the fresh mountain waters, sing a blessing into them, and offer them to the entrance of the Sound.
I am to ask permission.
Rocky Brook Falls is on the southeastern edge of the Olympic National Forest, outside of Quilcene, Washington. The waters cascade over 229 feet of a wide wall of dark rock, and there are boulders holding a large green pool at its base. In some places, the water launches off a jutting edge of stone and seems to suspend for a moment in its fall, the way a diver appears to hover for just a split second before the plunge. In some places, the rock slopes with moss and fern, and the water slips gently down amongst them.
Named Rocky Brook Falls for over 100 years, though no one knows where the name came from.
~
If you listen deep enough, everything has a sound. If you learn to hear it, you’ll be surrounded by memory. If you learn to name what you hear, you’ll be surrounded by relatives.
My ancestors were stacked in the belly of, not a whale, but a monster of tremendous appetite that ate up the seas. We know that thousands of them were tossed into the waters like so much bad waste. Babies, sisters, fathers. We know the lore of the Igbo, who landed on shore, and turning in their chains, walked back into the sea before they could be called anything other than themselves.
I am alone at Rocky Brook Falls for about 20 minutes, rare for this popular summer swimming hole. While I am alone, I roll up my pant legs and wade into the pool toward the falling water. It is cool and clear. I slip my hand through the waterfall to touch the face of the rock, which is also cool. I mean to ask for permission to collect water but suddenly my heart is aching, and what I find myself asking for is the waterfall’s true name. Then I am crying.
My auntie died the summer after I graduated from high school. I have her name written on a piece of paper I keep under a glass bowl filled with water on my writing desk.
Grief is a threshold emotion. Meaning, it is an entrance. Meaning, if you give it permission to land in your heart, it will take you to the truest name of your grief and tell you how to make an offering of it. It will teach you the honor of right address. Which is poetry.
Lisbeth White is writer and ritualist living on S’klallam and Chimacum lands of the Coastal Salish. As a writer, she has received awards, fellowships, and residencies from VONA, Callaloo, Tin House, Split This Rock, Bread Loaf Environmental Writers Conference, The Dickinson House, and Blue Mountain Center. Her writing has appeared in Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora, The Rumpus, Kweli, Apogee, Green Mountains Review, EcoTheo, Split this Rock, and elsewhere. As a healer and ritualist, she has been a facilitator of community-based healing justice workshops for social justice organizations nationwide. She is co-editor of the anthology Poetry as Spellcasting: Poems, Essays, and Prompts for Manifesting Liberation and Reclaiming Power, forthcoming from North Atlantic Books in Spring of 2023. Her debut poetry collection, American Sycamore, winner of the 2022 Perugia Press poetry prize is out now. You can find her digitally at www.lisbethwrites.com or on Instagram: @earthmaven.
