My relationship with the ocean, rivers, water has always been sacred. My dad taught me how to surf when I was young; I recall sessions crying in frustration one moment then in absolute awe as I glided with the waves the next. The ocean marked a place of connection and rest from imposed education and land-locked responsibilities. I remember long summer days screaming with best friends as the waves tossed us from our raft, carefully scaling rocks and reef barefoot to find creatures in tidepools, and watching the sun redden to match the flicker of a roaring bonfire.

Now, in a journey of re-claiming my pilipinxness, re-membering my pre-colonial european ancestors, swimming in my genderfluidity, and unsettling (decolonizing) to become a place, I find that the water, the west, is where my body converges – where it always has. Solar fission ebbs into lunar reflection. Rivers empty their travels into the maw of deltas and cascade cliffs until they reach dagat (the sea). Ancestral archipelagos thousands of miles away flood my veins in a torrent of truths only they/we/i could feel.

My ancestors, like the Indigenous Kumeyaay whose occupied land I am settled and grew up on, have versions of myth where the ocean is a source of creation. From here our world was birthed, here we are nourished in life, and here is where we return in death. The cycle of changes, of endings and beginnings, of transformation and liberatory dreams, of insurmountable individual and collective grief; the ocean can hold it all.

And yet, this too is our relationship with water:

Just 30 miles east of so-called san diego at El Capitan Grande, the canyon where the Kumeyaay river once ran, there is legacy of water siphoned and stolen – Indigenous stewards forcibly displaced to feed a growing settler-colonial populous. Our ocean is polluted at the Tijuana river mouth because our government would rather spend money on bombs complicit in genocide than clean water for our human and more-than-human relatives. Across the world, Palestinians yearning to regain access to their occupied sea become martyrs, so zionist and imperialist regimes can have trade routes for profit and plunder. In the halls of churches across the world lies holy water that absolves responsibility of reparation in the name of sin.

Control, harm, and over-consumption are part of our legacy with water because our survival is dependent on it. Instead of listening, changing, and adjusting towards right-relation with water, our answer has been to tighten and to take. Re-building a relationship with water starts within ourselves. Within our somas. Within our own legacies.

For me, this legacy is unraveled in fear. I have recurring dreams of tsunamis so large they block out the sun. I am usually with loved ones, family and kin, and we are forced to hold our breath and dive. Time slows. Sounds deepen. Shadows of alien creatures – primordial ancestors – whisper beneath us, felt but unseen. There is panic at first, then overwhelming acceptance as a wave the size of a city either pulls us to a watery demise or passes overhead.

This echoes feelings I have while surfing and am caught by winter’s powerful, frigid waves. The cold sucks the breath out of my lungs like a vacuum, leaving me scrambling for air. In these moments, where panic eats away last bits of oxygen and I’m swirling, unsure of which way is up, my internal monologue goes something like this:

These dreams and experiences beckon me to be in a practice of submergence.

We are in an apocalypse – ecocide, genocide, white-supremacy, and settler-colonialism have found home in our bodies and ways of being, bound so tightly in our blood and sinew that it is hard to tell flesh from foreign. I know at times I relate to myself and others through mechanisms of control because I fear I will not be cared for, loved, or seen – abundant resources made scarce by mechanisms of empire and non-belonging.

To survive this, to re-story, I must go into the depths: intergenerational trauma, learned/ingrained extractive ways of relating, past Havens and harms that need tending and blending, and kin to lovingly witness me as I dive; to keep me accountable to uncoiling control; to pull me to the surface when I cannot breathe.

Here, where my body is covered every inch in a watery embrace; here, where the sun trickles slowly through shifting reflections; here, where my self dissolves into other; I succumb to vulnerable reverence, and expand my capacity for healing into every tissue and cell and generation of my being until it flows back to the earth back to the rivers back to the sea and cycles again.

Laughter, connection, memories, awe, tears, gratitude, grief are all held here.

Where are you held?

What legacy will you shape with water?