What Giant Kelp Taught Me About Grief

Mystery, Creativity, and Remembering

A steady Saturday rain — the windows are all water, the music is all drops. I have been given a weekend at a cabin up Maine’s coast. Between rain curtains and still-bare winter trees I can see a cove of the Atlantic beyond. 

I am in a morning of what my friends with toddling ones call “big feelings.” Those feelings named directly aren’t for this page. I am not sure I could bullet point them if I wanted to, they slip through my fingers like water even as my muscles tense.

What I feel curious about, as this big water surrounds me, is what holds me (or, maybe more accurately, what I allow myself to remember I am always held by), when I am in the drift of feelings. 

The Buddhist teacher Tara Brach said, “We are the ocean, our feelings are a wave.” 

Years ago, in a season of vast grief, I was at the Monterey Bay Aquamarine. It is a stunning place. The centerpiece of the building is a three-story-high forest of giant kelp that sways in rhythm with the tides. I can, and have, stood for hours watching the tiny schools of fish move in one breath, the slow tiger sharks slinking between rocks, and the kelp — its thick yellow-green ropes, giant beings, that dance gently or wildly according to the waves’ swell while always tethered to the ocean floor. 

That kelp — swaying and secure — has become a profound inner resource for me.

I was terrified to give into grief. I felt I would drown in the immensity, that if I gave into my sadness I would never be able to come up for air. I tried all manner of ways to distract myself from the cresting wall of water.