Recalling the loss of her husband, Mike, Dianne Avey’s essay“Morning Light” (Spring 2023 Intima) reaches back a decade to a quiet September morning on Anderson Island in Washington. Avey, a writer and nurse practitioner, draws us, however, not to the moment of her husband’s death but to a “place of quiet morning light.” This liminal stasis exceeds cure and speech and, in my view, renders the “human” (as defined by technical and linguistic competencies) indeterminate. Yet, beyond our abilities to fix and to say, there remains “the only thing we can ever do”: being present and bearing witness.
Rachel Cicoria, who hails from Pine Island, Florida, is a graduate student in philosophy at Texas A&M University. Her essay “Eyes of Sea and Earth” appeared in the Spring 2023 Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine
I understand Avey’s bearing witness as a sensuous attunement to broader ecological rhythms of place (in her case, Puget Sound). While this ecological sensibility involves faculties such as sight and hearing, it does not “see” visible objects or “listen” for meaning. It has no practical efficacy and offers no absolution. It is, instead, a way of participating in the sensuous indeterminacies of ecological relationalities, of being in permeable connection.
Morning light invokes this ecological sensibility, drawing Avey into a place “suspended somewhere between here and there,” into a time neither then nor now. In this stasis of elemental mirroring—where reflection is just as much an activity of still green water as of “human” consciousness—patterns of light trace ecological porosities, rendering indeterminate two “places” of respite: Puget Sound and Mike’s body. Through refractions of color, shape and shadow, a “line of white shells marking the last high tide” reverberates in the bony contours of Mike’s body. Greenness flows through the waters of the bay, threads of a favorite chair, blades of seaweed, and beautiful eyes. Metallic tones permeate papery skin and maple leaves. Hieroglyphic veins infuse smooth black rocks and the pages of an archeology journal.
This sensuous blurring foregrounds movement—the ebb and flow of water and the tired rise and fall of Mike’s chest— and evokes broader cyclical rhythms of life, such as seasonal changes and migration patterns. Although these tacit dynamics weave the relational ecology of Puget Sound, they transpire with indifference to emergent life forms. In this respect, immanent to senses of ecological rhythm is a generative-destructive, living-dying force. Avey sensuously participates in this movement through breath. As rhythms of her body bear witness to the cycles of life in which both she and Mike are embedded, she is present to an endless ebb and flow in which “gifts of small water-worn talismans” wash ashore and souls depart. Enveloped in this (re)generative force, Avey finds comfort and reassurance.
Rachel Cicoria, who hails from Pine Island, Florida, is a graduate student in philosophy at Texas A&M University. Her essay “Eyes of Sea and Earth” appeared in the Spring 2023 Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine.