Riding the waves with Sabrina Imbler...

and contemplating what lies beneath. (PS Book Club meets Monday!)

It’s 5:30p here at the San Francisco Ferry Building. Commuters are lined up for their ferry rides home; early diners are already dining. I’m getting vaguely seasick, attempting to write on a laptop surrounded on three sides by rippling Bay waters.

I’ve sat on this bench, staring at this view countless times before, but this time is different. Tonight, I’m thinking about the purple mama octopus who sat still on a nearby sea cliff for four and a half years. Scientists from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute documented her brooding period—said to be the longest on record for any animal—witnessing her whither while her eggs grew. This remarkable feat of maternal sacrifice would have never crossed my radar if not for Sabrina Imbler’s essay “My Mother and the Starving Octopus,” the second in their brilliant book How Far the Light Reaches.

Throughout the book, tales of undersea creatures are vessels for deep insights into humanity. Reading and rereading Sabrina all month has shifted how I see the world and adjusted how I metabolize the news. The book has slowed me down, helped me settle my nervous system. I am in awe of Sabrina’s ability to explain the natural world—all while expanding our understanding of humans.

After the recent erasure of trans people from the Stonewall National Monument’s NPS website, I revisited Sabrina’s essay “Pure Life,” which juxtaposes urban queer safe havens (i.e., bars) with deep sea hydrothermal vents. Both are essential life support for the communities that feed off their warmth; neither lasts forever.

"These life-giving spumes can vanish at any moment if their heat source is cut off, perhaps undone by an errant earthquake or volcanic rumbling. A whole world extinguished by something uncontrollable.”

As a climate worrier, I tend to avoid stories of the natural world—they make me sit with my grief about what has occurred already and all that is coming. I feel like I know too much already to keep me from sleeping. As Sabrina observes midway through the book, while watching David Attenborough’s Blue Planet II, “It is hard to watch something and know it will die, but there is nothing I can do.” The note is about watching predator, or rather the creature defined as prey, but it’s also about everything.

Reading Sabrina this month allowed me to tune back into nature, to find optimism in the resilience of the wild. To look closely at the environent is, of course, an uncomfortable exercise in reckoning with how “we humans shape the world and scramble ecosystems,” but it is also an invitation to think differently. To dream new posibilities. While answering the question you might never have asked “What happens when you flush a goldfish?”, Sabrina invites the reader to:

“Imagine having the power to become resilient to all that is hostile to us. Confinement, solitude, our own toxic waste. Salt, waves, hundred-pound sturgeon that could swallow us whole. Imagine the freedom of encountering space for the first time and taking it up. Imagine showing up to your high school reunion, seeing everyone who once made you feel small, only now you’re a hundred times bigger than you once were. A dumped goldfish has no model for what a different and better life might look like, but it finds it anyway. I want to know what it feels like to be unthinkable too, to invent a future no one expected of you.”

Sabrina ends the collection with an anthology-essay, “Us Everlasting,” which remixes off the trope of queer people’s post-coming-out “second adolescence” and the observed regeneration of the immortal jellyfish into a prompt: “So what if you could do it over? And then again? What body would you choose? Who would you be and who would you love? Would you do it over, and over, and over again?

Pick up Sabrina’s book—or Sabrina’s own narrated audio version—to hear the many answers to these questions, and so much more.

Really looking forward to diving into the book with Sabrina at our next book club gathering Monday night. Details below. Have a question for Sabrina? Comment below or join us over in the chat.

xx Kyle

“Oases here, where so few things are certain, inevitably blink on and off. But life always finds a place to begin anew, and communities in need will always find one another and invent new ways to glitter, together, in the dark.”

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The Being Alive Book Club is reading Sabrina Imbler’s How Far the Light Reaches this month. Sabrina will join us for a conversation about creatures and queer bodies on Monday Feb 24th. All are welcome to attend—you don’t even have to finish (or even start!) the book—the only requirement is an open, curious heart.

Sabrina will divide their honorarium between the JPAYs of some of California's incarcerated firefighters who recently battled the LA wildfires. California's incarcerated firefighters typically make between $5.80 and $10.84 a day (when responding to active emergencies, they get an extra $1 an hour.)