sea variations (i)
walking-as-writing, echoes, trees...
5.13.26
The tree fell off the edge of the cliff. It is May, late spring 2026, and we were here last in June, 2025. We filmed the sea walk in June 2025 and September 2024, and this spot is one I’ve been coming to for years, first time visiting Shore Acres was in 2003, just after my (step)father died. I remember thinking then about the garden on the cliff above the sea, how precarious it seemed, that preciously tended patch of paths and foliage, with the sea waves crashing relentlessly against jagged rock faces below, and how perfect a metaphor it seemed for the ultimate smallness and futility—but necessarily so—of all our human effort and toil. I was thinking a lot about death on that visit, as it was the reason I’d been summoned there, and it was my entry point to Oregon, that stretch of rocky, tumultuous coastline that will always bring me back into alignment with the immensity (also, immense beauty) of our impermanence on this earthly plane. A path winds behind the garden, down to a cove of white sand beach, then up into the trees and out along the cliffs above the sea. There is a lookout spot along this sea-cliff path where there stand/stood two big trees, one perched at the very edge of the cliff, this one had been leaning toward its slow-dive into the sea for a couple decades, at least—I took some photos there (15+ years ago now) with my son when he was ten, and I remember we saw migrating whales swimming by, that time. I’ve been coming back to this spot every now and then since, and I love that it has remained the same, a little hidden, a small garden oasis by the wild sea, those winding sea cliff trails, those trees perched above the waves. You can walk those trails all the way to a point at the top of Cape Arago, where on some rocks further out in the water the sea lions gather. The barking of the sea lions is a sound that echoes all down the trail, you can hear them even from the forest parts of the path, mingling with songs of birds and waves.
Several years ago I began to imagine a long walk along a shoreline—as a moving image, a visual poem. This walking image-poem, I imagined, would have to be one continuous shot, an uninterrupted movement occurring in real time; I imagined it as a sort of culmination or response or evolution to the tendencies toward fragmentation that so much of my writing and self had thus far formulated itself in the shape of. What would a “poem” that was one continuous walking “line” *feel* like, in opposition or juxtaposition to all the experiences thus far formed out of fragments? Initially I envisioned this walk occurring along a beach, where the visual of waves repeatedly forming and erasing the shoreline—imaging my contemplation of the nature of hybrid writing as an inconstancy of “line” (i.e. a form of ‘ocean-writing’)—could be elucidated. As it turned out, my partner and I visited Shore Acres in September 2024 and ended up filming a walk moving through the forest and along the sea cliff trail, wanting to capture, in real time, what it felt like moving through the coastal forest to emerge along the cliffs with the sea coming gradually into view. We ended up making a walk that started at one tree in the forest and ended at another tree, the one perched at the edge of the cliff at that lookout point above the sea.
Thinking of this first walk as just a test take, we planned to re-do the filming, and visited again and filmed it the next year, in June 2025. But, in editing, seeing the two versions of the walk next to each other, I began to realize something else happening, seeing the walk in double, as echoes—variations—of the movement; that in this could be a form of ritual, a walking-as-writing slow choreography, in the repeating of the same walk (and how digressions and “accidents” occurred each time necessitating improvisation of the camera, too)—I also began to realize how long this tree had (perhaps) been speaking to me, or I to it: that I have been, somewhat unknowingly, revisiting it intermittently for nearly two decades of my life. Sometimes it takes this long for a practice to reveal itself. I decided to keep both versions of the walking video, placing them next to each other. (These two sea walk “variations” featured as video aspects in a performance-installation I made in September 2025, for the release of my hybrid music-and-literary project, Tender Revolutions/Yellow Songs, which debuted at PICA’s 2025 Time-Based Art Festival.)
It often seems to me that projects do not have clean beginnings or endings, and many pieces, actions, motifs and ideas, bleed into the next thing, or ask to be continued, revisited, repeated, re-voiced… Repetition is a form of echo; and I have been ruminating for some time on echoes, which is also to say, I’ve been ruminating on how we are held—by time, the past, familiar patterns or rhythms or musics, not to mention the many tendrils of memory that bind and (in)form us... A durational practice by its nature evolves only with/through time, and you engage in it necessarily not knowing what it will reveal; you accept the experiment of growth and time as a material factor. This all leads me to contemplating the fact that, arriving here in May 2026, to take this sea walk again, we find that the tree has fallen from the cliff. We did not film this walk five or seven years ago, but began filming it just two years ago, and on the third year coming to make the walk again, we find the tree is gone. Now, the other tree at that spot sits up there devoid of its companion. I realize my attempt at perception is very small, and my surprise maybe a bit naively human; or maybe it is that, as humans, as visitors, we take what we need from it—the path—that it does not need from us.
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One patch of the path has also collapsed, and the path at that spot has been diverted, now, to curve a little further inland. We continue to reorient our passages around and through, I suppose, until we can’t any longer.
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The song that associates with this long sea walk for me and that I performed as accompaniment to the videos, was “How Many Wars,” from the fourth part of the Tender Revolutions song-cycle of my latest hybrid project; the sea walk videos also correspond with the long poem, “Motherwound,” in the fourth chapbook of the Yellow Songs cycle. I thought this action of a continuous walk might resonate in some way with the rhythm of the poem’s text—which flows down the right edge (shoreline) of the poem’s pages… in this way the sea walk “video-poem” is also my attempt at “transposing” the textual poem, to a bodied, physical, visual realm...
A snapshot (below) of the book’s pages, which were printed on vellum so that the words overlay and overlap. I know it’s not the easiest reading experience… but this has been a poem that doesn’t want to conform to one shape, nor to one way of being read, and so it seems fitting this version of it requires some process of choice (multiple routes, detours, etc) one can take in reading it.
“Motherwound” long poem chapbook available from The 3rd Thing Press
listen to “how many wars” here
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thanks for reading this far, if you have. i am attempting to post some more reflective writing, some practice toward essay-ing, alongside project news & such. i know it’s a busy time & noisy world, so please feel free to unsubscribe if you need to. & much gratitude to those who wish to keep reading & listening with me :-)
+ some July things i’ll announce later…