I hear a splashing sound by the creek downhill. The splash is the work of a Coho salmon, pushing her way upstream. First, I pass her by. The splash could belong to any number of creatures. I know salmon lived in this creek, but years of waterways empty of salmon have deflated my hope of sighting this near-mythological creature.
I’m on a plant walk, learning the names and medicinal purposes of the plants in a local watershed. We walk through arbors of hazelnut trees once planted by the indigenous people of this land. Wherever they lived, hazelnut trees followed. The land, long colonized, still has the feather-soft leaves of hazelnut trees throughout the forest, but few edible nuts, for the fruition of the tree’s body requires a community of relationship, intention, and care.
Rediscovering my authenticity requires facing the grief of finding streambeds empty of salmon and softly creating the conditions for the return of ancient exiled wild spirits. The violently silenced history of this land is the story of its grief. In a culture obsessed with the upward thrust of progress, it’s a radical act to turn toward the downward pull of the soul’s gravitas. To listen to the land is to hear the ghostly voices of all the beings who once lived on this land. Their voices are present in the despair that puddles in the streambed of soul.
On the way back, I hear the splash again at the same spot. This time, I want to know its source. I tread carefully down to the creek, skidding down the soft soil, and hanging onto the trunks of hazelnut and redwood.
The salmon splashes again. The fin of her dark brown body is like a dragon, rising out of the water. She is at least two and a half feet long. She pushes back against the water hard and yet, doesn’t seem to make progress. She is not dissuaded. She continues to wiggle, push, and thrust herself upstream despite the opposing torrents of water. Perhaps the salmon is on her course of soul-making, following the whispers within that prod her forward on this near-impossible journey.
Whatever it is that drives her is an intelligence I’ll call god. Don’t we all know, each in our secret interiority, the force that drives the salmon? It is the same force of soul that pulls me down into grief, a force moving counter to the culture pushing toward the sun. Like the salmon, I turn upstream. I whisper words of blessing to the orphaned soul, who speaks, not only in raptures, but in a holy longing.
Loss is not an enemy. Loss is an invitation to welcome back to the table of conscious awareness the places that have been abandoned or neglected. It is the voices of those shadowed exiled places, be they those of our inner wounding or those voices outside us, human or more-than-human, that carry the medicine we need to “jump up and live again,” in the words of Martin Prechtel.
The journey to awaken and live a life driven not by unconscious convention, but deeply rooted in authenticity requires metamorphosis. Grief is the food that the caterpillar feeds on as she makes her transformation.
But soul-making is not the work of creating a beautiful immortal butterfly, flying apart and proud. Soul-making is a conscious journey toward death. The journey of becoming an individuated soul is to be cooked into good food for those who come after. It is to become a good ancestor making fertile soil. I surrender to the whispers pulling me away from an easy answer into the depths of mystery that will eventually transmute my body into good compost.
In the underworld of the soul, everything is reversed. The darkness becomes the place of seeing. Death is the gift of generosity. The feral territory of grief becomes the birth canal of love’s dark soil.
Does the salmon know the endpoint of her journey? Does she know that the pull to carry her fertile body upstream is a call to give herself as food?
I imagine she will know an otherworldly joy, as she lays herself down at the mouth of the river, releasing her eggs into the water.
I imagine she will hear the voices of those she loved and lost, all her ancestors, singing to her as she feels herself in death’s embrace on the streambed.
I imagine she will relish the bittersweet pearl of wisdom clutched in her mouth as the soil feasts on her bones.
