the turtle with no shell
Before I tell you this Story, it is important for us to acknowledge the 4 bodies present to honour the dignity of the Story. There is the storyteller, the listener, the Story itself as a living breathing being, the land/environment around you. Everything everything everything is helping tell this Story. Pay attention to what is in and around you, as part of the Story. I also need you to know that this Story doesn’t have an ending yet… It first visited me when walking the beach, slow enough to be looking for shells, wide in awareness enough to be in conversation with the meeting point of ocean and sky.
Once upon a time… upon a time once… once there was a time, not too long ago from this time, yet long enough for you to wonder what once happened… ONCE upon a time there was a turtle. A turtle who had no shell. She had 4 flippers, 1 head and 1 tail. She had 2 eyes and 1 mouth and 2 little nubs for ears, but she didn’t have a shell. She loved the feeling of the milky ocean against her soft animal body. She loved swimming with her friends Stingray and Blowfish. She loved going to school and learning about her home, the ocean. But what she loved more than anything, was riding the ocean currents. Feeling the water whip past her flippers. Going faster and faster. It became all she could think about all day long. When she wasn’t riding the currents, her flipper would tap in the memory and anticipation of the feeling. Turtle was known for riding the fastest and longest ocean currents. She took great pride in her abilities. There was only one current pathway she hadn’t ridden before, for she had only ever heard stories of people attempting and disappearing.
One day, she said to Stingray and Blowfish “I am going to ride the Red Window”. Stingray and Blowfish gasped… “No you can’t possibly!” They said. “It will be too much… We think it is time you stop riding currents.” Stingray and Blowfish loved Turtle a lot, they were getting concerned for how close Turtle had come so often.
But Turtle was determined. She told everyone she was going to ride the Red Window. She posted it on Ocean Media saying she will do it the very next day. As she prepared for the day and the day prepared for her, she began to hear a little voice somewhere very quiet in her, somewhere deep beneath her shell-less body, that maybe it’s not safe to go, that maybe they’re right. She quickly shook it off, because she’s Turtle who rides currents, she can do anything! And besides, she wouldn’t know how to move from one area of the reef to the other without currents, she’s always ridden the currents.
She came to the edge of the shelf overlooking the whipping current beneath her. Her 2 eyes scanned the direction of the gushing river within the ocean that heads straight for the rocky mountains, some of the water bends against its abrupt meeting and some slips through a tiny tunneling slit in the shape of a scallop before being released to the other side. She took a deep liquid breath and plunged herself in. WHOOOSHSHHH! The current picks her up and hurtles her through the water. This speed is much faster than what she is used to. Her bones begin to shudder, her skin begins to change shape, and as she nears closer to the hole in the mountain while she attempts to compress her body to make it through, the pressure is too immense and suddenly everything goes black.
Turtle wakes, maybe it is a while later, or is it days later, she cannot be sure. All she knows is she is waking from darkness into more darkness. “Blowfish? Stingray?” She calls out in the vast emptiness. Turtle slowly extends one flipper out into the dark and it smooshes against a hard but smooth surface. She traces the surface to find where it begins and where it ends, but it seems to stretch left, stretch right, travel up, travel down and around, it is all around her. It somehow feels both kind of it to envelope her, and cold and hollow. Through tired eyes she can see 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 6 fuzzy patches of light coming from the corners of this room. They’re not big enough to fit through, only big enough for her to fit 1 flipper, 1 tail or 1 head through. Tentatively, she dips 1 limb into the hole, and is met with hot dry air. She retracts it back quickly, not wanting to get burnt. She rests back inside the warm cold room, breathing rapidly, her back slumped against the wall. She eventually calms down and once again picks up the courage to lean another flipper through another hole, hoping maybe it will be different. Instead of the familiar liquidy sensation of the ocean, she feels rough rubble and quickly retracts, not wanting to get cut. She lays back in the room, looking up at the blue black space. She misses her friends, she is almost sure she can hear them laughing and having fun outside, just beyond the wall. She longs to be back in the ocean, but if being in the ocean meant she had to be in here, maybe she doesn’t want to go back into the ocean at all. So she stays in there for sometime, and only you and I can know how long she stayed inside for.
Until finally one day she decides to try her head. She very gingerly peaks her head out through the hole, and is temporarily blinded by the brightness. Turtle holds her eyes almost closed with her head exposed, hesitantly curious to see what is out there, and slowly, as slow as grass grows, begins to open her eyes. There before her, is Stingray and Blowfish and all the other Turtles from the reef. Her eyes widen with delight and she lunges forward to move closer to them only to be held back by the mouth of the hole. If only she could get out of this silly thing, then she could be back in the ocean with her friends. One of the older Turtles smiles lovingly and reaches out from its shell an open palmed flipper towards her. Maybe they always have had them or maybe they’re new, but maybe she never noticed but she notices now how all the Turtles have shells… She extends her flipper back out through the other hole, and takes the friendly flipper. The warmth of the contact on her soft bare skin is like warm milk and honey. The softness spreads throughout her whole body and before she realises what she is doing, another limb reaches out through a hole, and another, another, and finally her tail. Until all 6 of her limbs are peaking out through her shelter. Through her shell.
She blushes from her shell to Blowfish and Stingray, “I just want to be out of this thing so I can get back to the ocean with you guys again”. Stingray points to her barb, “I have this” and Blowfish puffs her cheeks up to demonstrate the beginning of herself swelling and says through muffled lips “and I haf thus”. Surprised and fascinated, Turtle feels around her new home and recognises she can feel through it the touch of something warm, maybe the sun. For we all know, maybe you know, the Marine Biologist in me knows that Turtles can’t leave their shell, their shell is a part of them, a living, breathing, growing part of the Turtle, that can actually sense the world around them.
My old way of inhabiting my shell has been beginning to feel like it no longer fits. I am feeling both liberated and displaced by the shifting foundations of identity in me. Like walking back on the path that you’ve just walked but now your feet don’t fit the footprints you remember making. I picked up a shell along a wandering walk today and in its curled and hardened skin, lived this Story. I wonder who you are in the Story? Recently I am both the living breathing sensing shell, suddenly awake to its abilities of intimate feeling with the warmth. And the flipper outstretched from a patient open smiling body, beckoning the squishy one to come, come as she is, shell and all.
I have spent a long time believing rest is the shell that will protect me from bed bound health expressions again. My definition of rest has been a life of slow, a life of quiet and a life of not too much or too intense. Because it bloody well did, for a season. And now, my context is changed/ing. Life is more colourful for me now and I have more desire to roll around in all the colours, more capacity too. But like the Turtle launching herself towards her friends, I had been frustrated by the containment of my belief system. Frustrated to be living in a body so sensitive and sensible (sense-able) to its needs of rest. Frustrated at the very thing that quite possibly once saved me. In courting the images I have been visited by, medicine walks where the dreaming earth mirrors back to me my questions, conversations with teachers and unmooring my attachments to regulation, I am beginning to uncover and (much to my honour) be met with the ones who the fear protects. I am curious and softly fascinated about what really embodying my shell feels like and can offer me and those I walk alongside.
