“Hannah! Hannah!”
I hear my name in my sleep first, ringing through the air in the dream I have wrapped myself in following those words until I am pulled into a conscious state. It is my partner, Henry, calling my name down the companion way of our sailing boat, from where he steers in the cockpit. My head is blurry with sleep, but the routine is so familiar. Get moving…
I pull myself out of the bunk, into my fleece jacket, into oilskins, squeeze my feet into waterproof leather boots. I climb the few steps from bunk to doghouse, doghouse to deck, out into the night air. It’s summer, mid-August, but out at sea the night air has a chill to it, as if it is already laced with autumn.
Henry and I talk briefly about how his watch has gone, and the plan for mine before he heads below to take some rest. It has, mostly, been smooth sailing. The plan is to continue with our heading (a sailing term for travelling in the direction the front of the boat is pointing), travelling through the Baltic Sea, on a passage between Visby, Gotland and Rostock on the northern coast of Germany. There will be a shipping lane to cross, but we probably won’t reach it until after my watch has ended.
We work together in these shifts, two hours on, two hours off, while we sail short-handed. It is tiring but manageable, especially in light weather. The wind blows steady from the south-east; our heading is to the south-west. It may build through the night hours, but not enough to need to reef sails. Our boat, Larry, is old, heavy, 18 tonnes, built sturdy and steady in 1907. She grips into the water. She knows her place in the world, she knows how to move through it.
I settle myself into a perch in the cockpit. The tiller is lashed, the heading holding, the sails set well, their canvas glowing gently with the green and red from our navigation lights, so there is no need for me to actively steer. I’m just here to watch, look out for other boat traffic, make sure we stay on course. Right now there is no one around. In the distance, there are pinpricks of light, tankers in transit, and an orange glow, the shore lights from Sweden, to our starboard, but there’s no one, no vessel, even close.
I lie back, wriggle my hips to get comfortable against the hard combings of the cockpit. I’m greeted with a wiggle back, a push against the hard, swelled skin of my stomach. A tiny hand? A tiny foot? A knee or an elbow? As Larry carries us through the water, back to the shore, I carry our unborn child, our son, within me. He seems to be awake, just like his mama. Awake and wiggling. I speak to him.
Look around us, little one. Look and listen. I’ll tell you what you hear. What I can see.
Light wind on canvas sails. Breeze on our skin. Moving water. Soft swell. Clink of shackles. Creak of wood. Mama’s breath. The beat of my heart. Above, an inky dark sky, where the stars race. A celestial show above us, as meteors shower, the Perseids – the leftover space trash from the last perihelion of the Swift–Tuttle comet, which last reached its closest orbit with the sun in 1992, two years before my own birth.
The stars above, the lights in the sky, they are how we humans learned to find the way, how early navigators moved through the world. I find Polaris, the North Star, the celestial anchor point, fixed in the sky, while all other stars rise and set from and into the sea. Orion the hunter, belt and bow and sword. Perseus, the hero, the focal point of the meteor shower.
The elements in our bodies, in the body I grow, inside and from and with my own, were made in these stars, a galactic chemical evolution as they burned out their hearts and released these elements into the universe, as they were swept into space. Nitrogen, oxygen, calcium and more.
These stars, they are in my bones, little one, and they are in yours. The lights we see, they are relics of the past. Many of the stars above us have already burned out, and what we see is their memory, their light travelling across space, so far away that we cannot see that the source of their light has already faded.
The water through which we sail is both ancient and new – moving, moving, constantly cycling. Cooling, heating, sinking, rising. Evaporation, falling as rain, soaking into and through the earth, eventually cycling back to ocean. The water through which we sail has been around the world and back, but never before has it been here, in this moment, with us.
The air we breathe, that nourishes me, that nourishes you, most of it comes from phytoplankton in these surface waters. They make our planet a home, they make it liveable for us. They give us this ocean breath. You don’t use your lungs yet, but you will. You will drink in this air. Together, we carry the future. That’s you, little one.
Wish upon the falling stars around us? My wish is that you see and that you feel all of this. How we sail by past starlight, how we sail through the sea in the present and into the future. How it’s all connected, how porous we all are, you, me, the stars, the sea. The strengths, the spirit, the heart and hope that come when we feel and move in synergy with the world around us.
Hannah will be giving a free Resurgence Talk on 30 July resurgenceevents.org/events
