NONFICTION
SOPHIA HAMMERLE
Inclusions
I’m looking for god on the shore of Big Fisherman’s Cove. Mustard yellow rocks slip through my fingers, weathered fragments of geologic time, that old eternity. I love a white rock with a black square. A black rock with a circumambient line. I lift each to my nose, hoping for ambergris. Hardened by the journey from a sperm whale's intestines to the shore, this rock of vomit acquires an earthy scent, like sandalwood, or tobacco. I heard it smells like heaven. I guess heaven probably smells like earth.
Here, the bellies of hills are full and ready to fall into the ocean. Red dirt rusts my jeans as I walk. Blueschist flakes under my bare feet. It’s the softest ground I’ve ever felt. I used to think green was my favorite color, green like the world, but this coastline is a post-impressionist painting of maroons, beiges, grays and yellows. Every color has an origin in nature.
This pebbled beach, where intertidal creatures hide under every rock, reminds me of the first time I saw a touch tank of sea stars. I petted their bumpy bodies until my hand grew numb from the cold. Sea stars are echinoderms, a group including sand dollars, feather stars, urchins, and sea lilies. In a touch tank, you can slip a finger between a sea urchin’s spines and feel them tighten around you, like a hug.
I push aside the deflated bladder of some species of kelp and sift through fragments of shells unrecognizable to the untrained eye. A limpet! A sea nipple! A green glint of glass. I once collected so much seaglass that my pockets bulged and my pants sagged. I saw it as a metaphor for fragmentation and wholeness, as if in collecting these weathered shards, I could reconstruct myself, erode my own brokenness into a treasure.
I slip a pebble up my sleeve for later as I pour sun-warmed stone over my body in handfuls, playing and delighting in the play. I put one in my mouth, slowly. And another, savoring the taste. The earthy tang of minerals courses through my body. Call it god, or rapture, or something. Call it joy.
My mouth overflows. Small pebbles slip out the rubbery edges of my mouth like a child dripping peas and carrots onto the floor. I dive into the sea.
✫
The pebble up my sleeve is a smooth, striped serpentine in glorious green. I put it in my mouth immediately to get a sense of its shape, round and hard like a cough drop. It hovers at the back of my throat. Peristalsis beckons. If I were a snake I would swallow this stone like an egg. But the rock is the snake, serpentine, ophiolite, from the Greek ophio- for serpent.
The snakeskin appearance of these metamorphic rocks comes from the minerals they contain. In geology, the word inclusion describes a material trapped inside a rock as it forms. Often, these are fragments of older rock encased in younger, igneous stone, fresh from the belly of the earth. A rock trapped inside another rock. I wonder what I include.
Snakes evoke an uncontrollable silliness in me. The long, smooth body; the stripes; the wriggling motion. The forked tongue, always out. I used to think a spiral could only move downward until I coiled a snake with my pen. How could I forget? Silliness is a choice to tap into the lightness of the world, the upward spiral, the inclusions of joy amid igneous grief. You never lose depth in delight. You climb up to look down, to gaze at the ocean. Later, in the waves, you remember where you’ve been.
I wonder if the ophi- in my own name means that I contain snakes. A false etymology to explain my urge to pet those slithery, delightful creatures. This inclusion links me also to the brittle star, the ophiuroid, named for the snaking movements of their limbs. Their meandering arms look like trails on a map, hikes that slowly unfurl the world like a brittle star across the landscape. The center becomes a home, in its simplest sense: the place from which your paths into the world radiate outward.
On a ridge traversing the island like a rib, you can drink dew from cactus spines at sunrise and watch from above as clouds crawl up the land, swallowing ocean and hills. There’s an isopod up here, a roly-poly pill bug in the sky. Heaven looks a lot like earth and smells like freshly baked bread, or clay, or something. Smells like home.
A barbed wire fence runs the length of the trail, rusted by the same oxidation that turns the dirt red. Letters bent from scrap metal spell names between the wires, crude and crumbling. Hearts with initials feel as ephemeral as love itself, and equally ferocious. Sharp metal barbs prick with the defensiveness of thinking you’ve found eternity on a ridgeline where rocks turn to rust and the ocean lifts into the sky.
I could walk out of the world right now, into that ocean of cloud. Beneath it, the waves wave and rocky coastlines bleed the blood-orange of kelp forests. I’ll remember this the next time someone asks if I believe in god. There are a lot of things to believe in.
Here, the bellies of hills are full and ready to fall into the ocean. Red dirt rusts my jeans as I walk. Blueschist flakes under my bare feet. It’s the softest ground I’ve ever felt. I used to think green was my favorite color, green like the world, but this coastline is a post-impressionist painting of maroons, beiges, grays and yellows. Every color has an origin in nature.
This pebbled beach, where intertidal creatures hide under every rock, reminds me of the first time I saw a touch tank of sea stars. I petted their bumpy bodies until my hand grew numb from the cold. Sea stars are echinoderms, a group including sand dollars, feather stars, urchins, and sea lilies. In a touch tank, you can slip a finger between a sea urchin’s spines and feel them tighten around you, like a hug.
I push aside the deflated bladder of some species of kelp and sift through fragments of shells unrecognizable to the untrained eye. A limpet! A sea nipple! A green glint of glass. I once collected so much seaglass that my pockets bulged and my pants sagged. I saw it as a metaphor for fragmentation and wholeness, as if in collecting these weathered shards, I could reconstruct myself, erode my own brokenness into a treasure.
I slip a pebble up my sleeve for later as I pour sun-warmed stone over my body in handfuls, playing and delighting in the play. I put one in my mouth, slowly. And another, savoring the taste. The earthy tang of minerals courses through my body. Call it god, or rapture, or something. Call it joy.
My mouth overflows. Small pebbles slip out the rubbery edges of my mouth like a child dripping peas and carrots onto the floor. I dive into the sea.
✫
The pebble up my sleeve is a smooth, striped serpentine in glorious green. I put it in my mouth immediately to get a sense of its shape, round and hard like a cough drop. It hovers at the back of my throat. Peristalsis beckons. If I were a snake I would swallow this stone like an egg. But the rock is the snake, serpentine, ophiolite, from the Greek ophio- for serpent.
The snakeskin appearance of these metamorphic rocks comes from the minerals they contain. In geology, the word inclusion describes a material trapped inside a rock as it forms. Often, these are fragments of older rock encased in younger, igneous stone, fresh from the belly of the earth. A rock trapped inside another rock. I wonder what I include.
Snakes evoke an uncontrollable silliness in me. The long, smooth body; the stripes; the wriggling motion. The forked tongue, always out. I used to think a spiral could only move downward until I coiled a snake with my pen. How could I forget? Silliness is a choice to tap into the lightness of the world, the upward spiral, the inclusions of joy amid igneous grief. You never lose depth in delight. You climb up to look down, to gaze at the ocean. Later, in the waves, you remember where you’ve been.
I wonder if the ophi- in my own name means that I contain snakes. A false etymology to explain my urge to pet those slithery, delightful creatures. This inclusion links me also to the brittle star, the ophiuroid, named for the snaking movements of their limbs. Their meandering arms look like trails on a map, hikes that slowly unfurl the world like a brittle star across the landscape. The center becomes a home, in its simplest sense: the place from which your paths into the world radiate outward.
On a ridge traversing the island like a rib, you can drink dew from cactus spines at sunrise and watch from above as clouds crawl up the land, swallowing ocean and hills. There’s an isopod up here, a roly-poly pill bug in the sky. Heaven looks a lot like earth and smells like freshly baked bread, or clay, or something. Smells like home.
A barbed wire fence runs the length of the trail, rusted by the same oxidation that turns the dirt red. Letters bent from scrap metal spell names between the wires, crude and crumbling. Hearts with initials feel as ephemeral as love itself, and equally ferocious. Sharp metal barbs prick with the defensiveness of thinking you’ve found eternity on a ridgeline where rocks turn to rust and the ocean lifts into the sky.
I could walk out of the world right now, into that ocean of cloud. Beneath it, the waves wave and rocky coastlines bleed the blood-orange of kelp forests. I’ll remember this the next time someone asks if I believe in god. There are a lot of things to believe in.
Sophia Hammerle is an emerging author based in Los Angeles. When not writing or creating, Sophia is probably eating a mango, thinking about trees, or feeding a stray cat. She studies narrative and gender at the University of Southern California.
