Crab Story

~ 15 years ago: Our church went to a new camp, and there were a lot of tide pools and creatures within the tide pools. During this time of my life, I had become extremely introverted at my public middle school. It was 6th grade. I felt so disconnected. No one had comforted me during these crucial development years from a child to a woman. I was always a tom boy, a true father's-daughter. and it was encouraged by the patriarchal society around me. But what happens when you can't be a little boy anymore, when your body starts changing and you start getting hormonal changes? No longer can you pretend to be the tom boy, and almost instantly it's as if the father who loved you so much last year, doesn't recognize you and you feel so lost, betrayed, and honestly afraid. The woman's journey is vastly uncharted waters. We don't have elders, initiations, or even a society that explains or supports any of that journey. We're just basically told to keep ourselves contained. Literally and figuratively. Then we're sold and taxed on a box of tampons, with the motto on the side in big bold letters, "Stops 99% percent of leaks before they happen!" What's the one percent it doesn't stop? Our personalities, our bottled up rage, our suppressed talents or unpopular opinions?

Anyway, like I was saying, I was going through a lot emotionally. 

I spent my time at camp smashing crabs with rocks on the jetty. I fed them to sea anemones. It wasn't out of hate for crabs, I loved all sea life. I still do. In retrospect, it felt like my last shred of expressing the feminine before I got completely severed from it. The intuitive feminine knows the circle of life very well. This is the pre- domesticated feminine. The feminine that we were before patriarchy, suburbs, and modern life. As I like to call it, Womb and Tomb Energy. We understood the circle of life- we knew when things had to die, we didn't prolong unnecessary suffering. You see this in the animal kingdom a lot. When a pup isn't healthy, wolves and rabbits for example kill their young. I'm sure some of you are horrified right now reading this, but isn't it more horrifying that we have come to think prolonging suffering is the right thing to do? That seems very selfish. We used to let the dying die. 

Today, I was walking on the beach with my dogs. I saw a crab flipped over, belly up with his many legs and pinchers exposed. I went to touch him because I thought he was dead. He moved and I was startled, "What are you doing out here little buddy?!" There's no tide pools at Long Beach, he was a long ways from home. 

I tried to save him, I flipped him over. I walked down the beach and came back, but he still hadn't moved. So I picked him up and put him in the ocean, he was moving his mouth and occasionally his legs, but other than that, the tide was just washing over him and he wasn't doing well. I was like, "You got this buddy!" Knowing damn well he didn't have this. He was sick- there was algae all over the beach. But now, after 15 years of domestication, I couldn't bring myself to kill him. I walked away, feeling horrible, because we're all creatures from consciousness, and I just left him there to be sick on the beach instead of to return his little crab soul back to God (not the guy in the sky- the everything and the nothing, the unnamable, the simultaneously him, her, and it and also, nothing and everything at the same time).

Is this what years of being so out of touch with my Womb and Tomb Energy has done to me? I thought walking back home. 

I'm just becoming aware of this. I don't have anything to say about it yet. I just thought it was interesting and that I would share in hopes that other females can draw parallels in their lives. I'm writing a memoir about my heroine's journey, and this ties in perfectly with it.