Stories have always been a way to animate the world, to express Earthly aliveness. Through stories we share perspectives and in the process we de-centre our own narrative, perhaps get inside the mind of a dolphin or a violin or a piece of seaweed.

Developing kinship with seaweed has, for me, directly translated to acknowledging all the other things that are critical yet often unseen, like fungi, soil microbiology, air, webs of connectivity or like our personal intentions and dreams. Seaweed has helped me attempt to live in a way that respects the unseen.

The potential in a clump of seaweed could change the world. It’s not the sole solution to global warming, but it is an important piece in the climate puzzle. It’s part of an approach that’s grounded in connection, conservation and regeneration, where we tread lightly, acknowledging the role we play in restoring balance. We’re at a turning point, and what we do now will determine our future.

We learn at a young age that underwater, the breath of life pirouettes towards the surface in bubbles. We also learn pretty quickly, when we emerge gasping, that the bubbles eventually run out. It’s in water that we can finally see the invisible air that pumps our heart, the invisible air that we suppose is always kind of just hanging there, the invisible domain that we now take for granted.

I was sitting in a room with all of the other young sailors. An adult, who seemed to be in charge, was drawing the infinity symbol with a marker on a whiteboard. Apparently that was the course: infinity. The girl next to me looked up, nodded and drew the course with her finger in the air, memorising it. I had been hopeful up to this point, but now I was utterly confused. Then we left the room to get race ready. Some kids stayed back to study infinity.

“If you come to our farm, you're not going to be served poison.”
After dining at Brae and chatting with head chef and owner Dan Hunter at length, it’s this statement about poison that lingers with me.

That the wild emanates an incessant beckoning call is no secret. Jack London’s masterpiece, The Call Of The Wild, is named after it. London describes the magnetic pull of the wild, “deep in the forest a call was sounding, and as often as he heard this call, mysteriously thrilling and luring, he felt compelled to turn his back upon the fire and the beaten earth around it, and to plunge into the forest, and on and on, he knew not where or why; nor did he wonder where or why, the call sounding imperiously, deep in the forest.” What’s more, London’s protagonist in this short novel is not a man, as we might assume, but a wild dog. The call of the wild is felt by human and dog alike, and by the primordial wolf within everyone.

I was standing at the Southern Terminus of the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT) with an entire country in front of me. I was 65km east of San Diego and the U.S/Mexican border fence threw shadows across the red dirt. The great American expanse stretched out before me as the sun rose, revealing the burnt landscape of the Mojave Desert. I was with a young man from Oklahoma that I had met the night before. After a nervous laugh that lingered underneath the cloudless sky we started walking.