Migrations

by Charlotte McConaghy

Forget safety. Live where you fear to live. —RUMI

The walk to a village was longer than any I’d tried, and the books grew so heavy. I started leaving them on the road, a trail of words in my wake. I hoped they would help someone else find their way.

But the rhythms of the sea’s tides are the only things we humans have not yet destroyed.

It’s not life I’m tired of, with its astonishing ocean currents and layers of ice and all the delicate feathers that make up a wing. It’s myself.

There are two worlds. One is made of water and earth, of rock and minerals. It has a core, a mantle and a crust, and oxygen for breathing. The other is made of fear.

Then again, it’s a fool who tries to protect a creature from its own instincts.

as long as we’ve been breathing. I used to listen

If I were a deep-sea creature the storm would be nothing to me but a vista above, a painted roof to the world.

“It never stops moving around the world. It edges its way slowly down from the polar region, and some of it forms into ice. Some of it gets saltier and colder and starts to sink. The water that sinks into the deep cold makes its way south along the ocean floor, through the black twelve thousand feet down. It reaches the Southern Ocean and grazes the icy water from the Antarctic, and then it gets flung across into the Pacific and the Indian. Slowly it thaws, warmer and warmer and rising to the surface. And then at last it turns for home. North again, all the way to the mighty Atlantic. Do you know how long it takes the sea to make that journey around the world?”

We are, all of us, given such a brief moment of time together, it hardly seems fair. But it’s precious, and maybe it’s enough,

I think of the impact of a life like that. It sounds quiet, and so small as to be invisible. It sounds like the unexplored, unseen Point Nemo.

What must it be like to be bound so deeply and willingly to a place?

There has to be some way to be a father and a good man, and still be me.”

I never worked out how to be relied upon and also free.

I’m not meant to long for the things I have always been so desperate to leave. It isn’t fair to be the kind of creature who is able to love but unable to stay.

I deal with many patients who suffer a quality that can damage their lives and those of the people around them.

“The stronger you are, the more dangerous the world.”

“Don’t apologize too much, kid. It’ll bleed you dry.” “What if you’ve a lot to apologize for?” “Once is enough for anything.”

He has his own grief to bear and his own strength to gather, and he finds his in work, not in freedom from responsibility, not in journeys or movement or turning resolutely forward and not looking back.

Saving specific animals purely on the basis of what they offer humanity may be practical, but wasn’t this attitude the problem to begin with? Our overwhelming, annihilating selfishness?

If they’ve died, all of them, it’s because we made the world impossible for them.

It’s not love, or fear. It’s the wilderness within that demands I survive.

Because it seems to me, suddenly, that if it’s the end, really and truly, if you’re making the last migration not just of your life but of your entire species, you don’t stop sooner. Even when you’re tired and starved and hopeless. You go farther.

Mam used to tell me to look for the clues. “The clues to what?” I asked the first time. “To life. They’re hidden everywhere.”