Being here at Vashon Artist Residency for nearly a month has allowed me the opportunity to experience the constant sense of feeling valued as I know that everything around me has been made possible by the generosity of its founder, Cathy Sarkowsky. In the wake of this sense of support, I am discovering an expanding awareness of abundance in general. Living in a place where I know each day that I’ve been granted a rare and precious gift is providing me with yet another gift: I am noticing that the earth itself is showering me with riches.
Walking on the beach every day, I marvel at the stones underfoot, knowing each has been brought here by geological forces that feel epic. Bending down, I pick up a tawny one, no bigger than a golf ball, and I am holding in my hand a story that began 1.4 billion years ago under the desert sands of Africa. There, over the course of a number of years inconceivable to me, it sank below the continent, traveled inches each year on its vessel of a tectonic plate beneath the earth’s mantle to be disgorged again into the pacific ocean and rolled and tumbled in the tides and storms to land here at my feet over a BILLION years later.
And every other stone underfoot has its own story to tell. Shiny black basalt, sparkling white quartz, olive colored peridotite, porous pumice, rosy granite, and grey chert laced with fine lines of silica. The cool thing is that the “once upon a time” part of their stories stretches back over eons and the “in a land faraway” part happened deep beneath the earth’s crust. And there they lie, countless encapsulations of geological deep time, waiting only for me to stop and notice.
Within this expanse of stones that goes on for as long as I want to walk, clusters of shiny purple mussels cling to one another beside the bleached and barnacled backs of oysters, beckoning with their own kind of mini-monstrous appeal. As I walk, watery vertical squirts before and behind surprise me as if the clams half-buried in the sandy mud are laughing as I pass.
My most treasured gift is the sea itself, always ready to receive me when I work up the courage to enter into its enlivening embrace. Lingering before I dive, feeling the sun on my bare back and arms, I peer through the clear water to watch the ocean floor come alive. First my my eyes must adjust to see beyond the apparent stillness of rocks and broken shells and take in the small movements above them. Tiny crabs skitter busy over pebbles, thin black threads whip back and forth from the volcano-like forms of white barnacles (cousins to the crab), pulling in food with these unlikely little legs, and clams burp, emitting stray bubbles that rise to the surface.
Finally, I decide it’s time to swim. I fall forward letting my body slice into the chill that saturates my skin and mind and brings on that familiar sense of myself as effervescent. I lie back, floating between earth and sky, releasing, surrendering into ocean’s enlivening embrace. I look up at the sunshine and revel in my good fortune until the cold begins to feel like too much.
Then, I head back to my room and the luxury of a hot shower.
So many gifts.
Thank you, Vashon Island Residency.
Thank you, Cathy Sarkowsky.
Catharine H. Murray 