By Christina Rivera Cogswell
One winter in India, I picked up the word bardo and put it in my pocket. There I thumbed the cold, smooth, stone—turning it over and over in unidentified obsession. The word wasn’t mine. I might have received it from a Lama’s teaching in Bodhgaya, the small town whose fame rests in the shade of the Bodhi tree under which the Buddha once meditated. It’s likely there the word bardo was born along with Buddhism, about six millennia before the birth of the guy we call Jesus. I put the word in my pocket because it was in the shape of something I couldn’t otherwise name. I held onto it. Rubbing its smooth sides between my fingers, unclear as to my obsession for the term I was taught as meaning the state of existence between death and rebirth. Pema Khandro Rinpoche, a scholar of Tibetan Buddhism whose teachings focus on the coalescence of tradition and the modern context, takes the bardo a step further. She describes it as, “moments when gaps appear, interrupting the continuity that we otherwise project onto our lives.”
A man I once loved said to me, “There’s something about the way you leave.” I had been looking for my socks under his bed. I popped up my head, “What?”
He continued, “You know what it is? You never look back.”
I paused my hustle, tilted my head.
He added teasingly, “I would know, I’ve watched you go enough times.”
I laughed a little too hard, tugged on my boots, deposited a kiss on his cheek, and ran out the door to catch my waiting taxi. But looking through my reflection in the window of the cab, I thought long about what he’d said. About my ease in letting go. About my secret love for the breaks in continuity, for the liminal places between here and there, and what I find inbetween.
*
The world was dark but it was the only world I knew. Dark was the womb and dark was January 3rd in Anchorage, Alaska. On the night I was born, the sun set at 3:57pm and rose at 10:12am. I was due on the winter solstice in December, but my mother carried me fourteen more days into the year of growing light.
My mother was ready. She had waited for me for the seven years between me and my older sister. She tells the story of How She Gave Up going like this: She had a garage sale. She sold the stroller and the crib and all the things babies shake. She sold the box of toddler snow pants, boots, and winter coats my older siblings had shed. She sold it all and when it was gone from the house—only then—was I summoned: a heartbeat knocking in an empty womb. This is the story of my beginning, of the waiting place I was born from, and of the eighteen hours and twenty five minutes of Alaskan night I was born into.
One night that same winter a window in my nursery was left open, leaving not even a pane of glass between me and the coastal lowland darkness where temps can drop to a single digit. That night I unfurled from my swaddle of blankets and did not cry. That night my mother awoke, startled by a shake of instinct. She ran to my room and picked up my cold and quiet body. She willed me to warmth with the racing heart in her chest.
This is my creation myth. In it, whispers rattled from dreams, darkness reached through an open window, and death came close enough to touch me—but I did not cry.
*
We moved from Alaska to Oregon when I was three and my first memory is watching the top of Mt. St. Helens explode while propped by my dad's hands on the hood of a red suburban. My second memory is standing near a fence outside my house, pulling my thumb out of my mouth, and deciding I was done sucking it. But it's my third memory from early childhood I want to retrieve. In it, I pulled out a sled from the garage and dragged it behind me. I didn’t know where I was going. I know this because I have a five-year-old and I watch her. When my daughter nestles under the arms of the big Blue Spruce in the front of our house, she does not “go” there so much as she is pulled. To that quiet place that fits only her, where she is enveloped in the underside perfumes of pine needles and cold soil. A hidden place between earth and day.
Like my daughter, I was pulled. But I was pulled—in this third memory—to the heart of the rhododendron bushes in the yard. Had my mother watched me from the deck, she could have tracked me by my sled-print into the bushes. Bushes that blushed red and pink in the summer, but did not blush on this day, when they were sunk by a rare foot of Oregon snow. I centered the sled between the unblushing bushes and lay down with no intention to go anywhere. This will become my thing. Using things made to go fast, to go slow. Or to go nowhere at all; to hover in a midst. But I didn't know this yet. I was only five and just lay there, warm in my mittens and hand-me-down snow bibs. Watching the snow fall, not sideways from the perspective of the upright, but watching the snow fall from under the snow. And this is what I remember distinctly: Looking for a source. Searching in the diffused Oregon light, that farthest edge of falling white, looking for what was beyond the grey camouflage of clouds. I was looking for the darkness I knew was on the other side. I lingered so long I remember no ending. I remember no one calling me back from the deck. I remember only the question in my mind: But behind that? I wanted to pierce it. To conceive it. And what’s behind that? I asked, again and again. Darkness, I already suspected, a thin veil for something beyond the horizon.
*
I remember the gulls. The calls of those flying overhead but more the squawks of those squabbling over what the fishermen in rubber boots and gloved hands were tossing aside from the long metal counters where fish blood pooled. I was squabbling with the gulls because we were competing for the same goods. But I won because I was an adorable four-foot-tall thing with choppy black bangs wearing a sweater with a rainbow on the chest.
“Is it fish heads you’re after, kid?” The salt-crusted voice came from a white-bearded man in rubber waders. “Here you go. Take ‘em all.” And to the squawking disappointment of the gulls, my little brother and I stole off with the plastic bag full of our good luck and headed towards the docks where the water was just dark but clear enough.
At the end of our favorite planks of splintered wood, we propped in cobra poses, hanging over the edge. My brother is only a year younger than me. There is no garage sale in his creation myth. My mother went to the doctor some months after my birth and said, “Stop the pregnancies.” The doctor said, “Just a quick test first,” and my mother dropped her wet face into her hands because she knew the test would only confirm what her dream had shown her the night before: a shock of black hair on a smiling baby boy.
Nine months later, my brother was born, a ball of sunshine and spunk. In his haste to catch up to me, he began walking at five months. That is his legend. And also how we found ourselves lined up like sardines on the wooden docks of southern Washington.
My little brother did everything I did, and I was squinting past my reflection, into the watery depths, where we could just make them out on the bottom of the ocean floor—moving sideways. The crabs were feasting on the pile of fish heads the small gods, twenty feet above on the docks, kept dropping from the ocean sky. These sky gods, they tied the fish heads to tangles of discarded fishing line, but the small hands of the sky gods were bad at tying knots. So the crabs yanked the fish heads from the lines with ease and enjoyed the free lunch.
Like this my little brother and I had been feeding the crabs for weeks. There was the rare occasion, of course, when a crab hitched itself good to a fish head. On this occasion we were so gentle in pulling up the line, the crab did not notice the ocean floor beneath him—sinking—and the light from that curious sky above getting closer. The faces of the sky gods above were both ecstatic and terrified because, after all, we were reluctant gods. What exactly would we do with the clawed thing once it was within our reach? How would we navigate those pinchers we had seen draw bright red blood from our dad’s calloused brown hands?
Our reluctance shook the line. Enough for the crab to notice the sky light too close: It decided the fish head wasn’t worth the journey to the other side. Sideways—the crab walked off the fish head. Down he tumbled through twenty feet of darkening blue bardo. Landing back on the sandy bottom of his existence. Knowing better—or maybe not—for next time. And I, I backed up on that splintering wooden dock with a love for murky floors, for backward-walking things, and for the mysteries of Pacific blue depths, into which I had learned I could lower a line.
*
I was chasing a whale shark. Or at least rumor of one. The rumor turned out to be false, but it got me to the right place: to the wooden docks in the Bay Islands of Honduras from which I first submerged into the water underworld.
I was not born into the “sport” of scuba diving. But we did spend my mother’s teaching breaks living out of rusted-white trailer that sat permanently in a campground across from Oregon’s Pacific Ocean. There I passed the days in the crags of low tide: turning over snail shells and waiting for the claw of its hermit to unfold; marveling the returned rubbery grasp of a willowy sea anemone; sitting still for long enough that my shadow merged with rocks until armies of black crabs emerged from sea walls. Like this I came to know the above-ocean world—the difference between the smells of hot and wet sand, the poke of beach grass through my sweater, the curl of my hair touched by salted mist. But, as a child, I never fully submerged my body in the ocean.
I was twenty-one when I first pulled an ill-fitted pair of rented fins over my feet and a scratched scuba mask onto my face. When my heart stuttered as I shuffled backwards into the sandy break so as to not—as I was instructed by a local—disrupt any resting Stingrays. I was twenty-one when I reached that precise depth of Caribbean sea where I could lift up my legs, turn my body over to the buoyant palm of the ocean, and lower my face—for my first look ever—into the wilderness of the ocean. I might have screamed. I shouted enough through my snorkel that my best friend on the beach fell over laughing. My whole body trilled with the shock of life and color moving under the Mar Caribe. The blue world simply turned on, like a lightbulb. And damn, if it existed—all along, right below my nose—well, what couldn’t? What else could I see, could I find, in total submersion?
Whale sharks. Or so I hoped when I chased that rumor of their migration to the Bay Islands of Honduras. The biggest fish in the world, with a white belly under checkerboard blue skin, could reach the mythical proportions of forty feet in length and forty tons in weight. My first week on the island of Utila, I signed up for an Open Water Certification course. The second week, my Advanced Diving Certification. Unable to leave the water, I asked a dive shop if they'd train me as a divemaster. I had no intention of ever working as a divemaster. I had every intention of diving every morning and afternoon, every day.
On one of those days I was on the boat with two other divemasters, one Swiss and one Australian. Sixty feet under water, I caught them in my periphery—chasing each other’s fins, grabbing wetsuits, snapping masks, yanking tanks, somersaulting over each other—all in tryst over some hand-sized treasure seized from the sand. As we ascended, large air bubbles bottled my laughs and lifted them to the ocean top. Back on the boat, the tantrum tumbled towards me, “Look! Look! It’s amazing! Look!” Each boy pulled from a sleeve of his wetsuit a fragment of what looked like delicate pottery. As they produced the two halves, one reached over to the other and smacked him across the back of the head. “Look what you did! I can’t believe you broke it!” While the smack was returned, I took the two pieces, matched their hems together, and allowed myself only a half smile. One boy returned his attention to me and exclaimed, “Look at the fine inscriptions, the delicate handiwork!” The other echoed, “Can you believe it? Do you think it's a Mayan artifact? It must be!”
Indeed, the most ornate and symmetrical looping flowers were stitched across the clay-like surface. I couldn't hold back any longer and cracked a grin. The boys’ eyes narrowed. I shook off my smile and told them the story of the shell I knew well. A shell that had evidently evaded the closer shores of their own homelands. The boys passed the flowered piece between them. “Really? It’s called what? A sand dollar?” The boys stashed their respective pieces back under the sleeves of their wetsuits. One thumped the other over the back of the head and said, “A sand dollar.”
I distanced myself from their re-initiated tumble, but today I still hold the story close. Because I remember the marvel. The spell of sea treasure. The precious relic pulled from one world into another. I would eventually chase the rumors of Whale Sharks to the coasts of four more continents. I’ve still never seen one. I don’t care because I’m happy with the places the clues took me. Wrong clues, but keys nonetheless, unlocking my awareness to the 70% of Earth's body of unknown depths and indeterminate borders on maps. Clues that led me into a chase of inconceivable wonders. The stingray hiding in the sand, the fish of mythological proportions, the sand dollar pottery—they are spells of wonder, for me—still unbroken. Today, when I enter the ocean, when the water reaches the halfline of my mask, at that moment when I see the world above the ocean and the world below at the same time, when I fall into the palm of the sea and hover in the bardo between the wavy-blue and blinding-white, that same first question arises again and again: If this exists—what can’t?
*
An Albatross’ view, high enough, might render it flat. The ocean top of course is anything but, with crests pulled by tides and tides pulled by gravity and gravity pulled by the wane of a moon in orbit of Earth in orbit of Sun in orbit of a heart of stars at the center of the thing we call The Milky Way. The Albatross knows the sparkling top is neither flat nor wall. She watches for the flash of scales, for switchbacking shadows, that she may punch her body from the world of air into the world of water and retrieve from it an offering. It is in this otherworldliness I’m interested. Below that first layer of ocean 200 meters from the top that we call the Sunlight Zone—a place I have travelled not even the half of with flippers and mask and a tank of air on my back. Below that zone that begins at 200 meters called the Twilight Zone where darkness becomes also the day. Below the Midnight Zone at 1000 meters and even the Abyssal Zone at 4,000. I am reaching for the Hadal Zone defined as 6,000 meters “and deeper.” I want to know more about the place called “and deeper.” It brings me comfort to know there is a place on Earth unnamed by man. A place where the pressure is lethal to colonizers, where sound and light move in different waves, where the same pressure that bars human entrance has evolved what lives at the bottom into soft bones and squishy bodies. Squishing life to its marrow.
Pema Khandro Rinpoche’s took her definition of the bardo further, “If we appreciate these successive deaths and rebirths in our lives, then we can value the bardo for what it is—the pause that makes movement apparent, the silence that makes all sounds more vivid, the end that clarifies what exactly we will now be beginning.” The open window in the Alaskan room. The subconscious whispers to mothers from night dreams. The reach of an echoing existential question through a snowy Oregon globe. The “and deeper” of oceans where bones bend. What they have in common is a pause—and my longing to linger there—in the palm of that vulnerable unknown, between the islands of death and life, land and water, conscious and unconscious, seen and unseen. To drop into the darkness of not-knowing and see what crawls sideways on its murky floors.
I love the ruptures in continuity. Ruptures that voyage us into the bardos of slippery words and wave-less goodbyes and telling dreams and the sub-degree stillness of the Hadal Zone. But loving the ruptures is my secret. By day I deny it. I put on makeup and jeans and shoes like these layers will hold me back. I busy myself with holidays and excel sheets and laundry, tasks that spin me into something that looks like perfect circles. But it feels like it’s all catching up to me: my denial of my excitement for the things that strip us down, shake us up, stand us still, bring us closer to what’s outside the window of square existence. And while it catches up, I stand here with the cold stone in my pocket—turning it over and over. My reminder of my many small deaths, my as-many rebirths, and all my experiences of non-linear being. Not just reminder, but also portal. To the place deep inside where I hear the echo of that same old question I mulled under the unblushing Rhododendron bush: And behind that? What’s behind that? A place where I turn my body over to the buoyant palm of something not just liminal, but something oceanic. Ceding control to a current underneath.
Christina Rivera Cogswell's essays are published or forthcoming at Orion, Kenyon Review, Terrain.org, Bat City Review, Catapult, and elsewhere. She credits the fragmentation of her writing to her young children and is currently finishing her first book of essays—a collection of ecofeminist reflections on motherhood in the face of climate crisis. You can follow Christina on Instagram @seekingsol.