before the world’s highest mountains; before the atlantic ocean even existed

the silent, the sacred & the unseen: becoming frog

1.

Do you ever look at something- really look at something- perhaps something very ordinary, and in the process of your looking, the more wondrous it becomes? Eyes that look long enough become softened, begin to alchemise, experience a focus change that causes solids to dismember and dissolve.

And within the blurring of identity, a fuzzing of the lines between what is me and what is you, what is you and what is me, the mind itself becomes tenderised. Words of identity or description gentle. True looking is an unknowing, a flicking off the edge of what we pretend to understand.

When the edges of my looking begin to blur, I feel that to be the point I start to see.

2.

Archey’s frog- a frog only found within Aotearoa  New Zealand- is classified as the world’s most evolutionarily distinct and globally endangered amphibian. They have evolved virtually unchanged for 150 million years, surviving the comet that wiped out the dinosaurs, the Ice Age, the splitting of continents.

Seventy million years ago Aotearoa New Zealand cracked and broke away from Australia, isolating Archey’s frog and her relatives from all predatory mammals.

 Helen Meredith, Amphibian coordinator of EDGE, a conservation program with the Zoological Society of London said:

 “Archey’s frog is almost indistinguishable from the fossilized remains of frogs that lived 150 million years ago […] These frogs were around before the Atlantic Ocean existed, and before the planet’s highest mountain range—the Himalayas—had even started to form.”

Before the world’s highest mountain range

had even started to form.

Before the Atlantic ocean

even existed.

3.

I’m sorry you’re sad, my eldest son whispers across the table. I look up, offer a half smile. I do not realise my face gives so much away, even though I should know this about myself by now. It’s a face made for charades and not for cards.

She’s sad about the frogs, he goes on to tell his brother.

I sit, think about the ridiculousness of my predicament. I argue with myself inside my head.

How ridiculous that I’m sitting here in a café with my boys feeling sad about the frogs.

How ridiculous that everyone sitting around me isn’t sad about them too.

How ridiculous is this all?

I’m not sure I want ever to not be ridiculous.

How do you be in the world with so much wonder, and at the same time, so much gloom?

I am sad about the frogs.

I am angry about the frogs.

It’s all ridiculous.

I take a breath, another bite of food.

4.

Frogs in fairy tales, as we perhaps understand them now, are most commonly thought of as the creature you need to kiss before you find your prince, a warping, most likely, of the Frog Prince, the fairy tale from the Brothers Grimm. In the modern version, it is the kissing of the frog that brings about the transformation; in the original it is the complete rejection of the frog that transforms him.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the original story is about the assertion of free will; it speaks of defiance, both in the upholding of what is essentially a bad deal, a refusal to succumb to a father’s unreasonable demands and most starkly, the rejection of the status and role of women in society generally.

The more modern kissing version translates to doing what you’re told, being accepting of your fate, a shaping and a moulding back to the patriarchal ideals that benefit from keeping a woman in her place.

Whatever ‘her place’ has come to mean.

Perhaps, given their current situation, frogs and women have been allies all along.

Perhaps the frogs need to wholly reject the human, to turn their fate around.

Perhaps there is a third space that we, together, can both find.

I wonder if in frog fairy tales they are forced to kiss humans in the same way we’ve designed.

If there could be a wider tale, a refusal to succumb to unreasonable demands and perhaps most starkly, the rejection of the status and role of creatures in society generally.

If not, that’s a fairy tale we most definitely need to write.

Placed under the header of non-fiction.

5.

The other morning, I packed us up and marched us off to the museum. We are going to hear a talk about the frogs, I triumphantly declare. In my mind, I am performing an important act of mother- the transmission of wonder. Or, by translation, a sharing of what is wonder-full to me.

Frogs are amazing, I tell them. Their response shows me they’re yet to be convinced.

We arrive and merge amongst a group of humans communing in a hallway round a fish tank. It’s the school holidays (a point I conveniently forget in the cocoon of home schooled boys) so the meeting place is somewhat of a brawl. There are many screaming children accompanied by listless and disinterested adults. I suppress the urge to man handle a boy of eight or nine who squashes his face against the edges of the tank, his hand wearing a glove of long, rubbery, fluorescent pink and orange fingers that he raps upon the surface of the glass.

Augustus Gloop, I mutter quietly out loud. I coach myself on the virtues of not being judgemental. My mind ignores my better talking half.

Of all the things I constantly wrestle with, the top of my list is the urge to completely flee and run. This gaggle I’m a part of strengthens this desire. To forest or to lake. A forest on the edges of a lake. I think that’s it. Abandon ship, as those of us harbouring such imaginings commonly say. It’s not so much to not be here as it is to be away from all of that.

 All the made up things that take priority as important.  The overly loud tapping on the foreheads of those seeking out the quiet. The pressures and the structures of out there, that have somehow found their way in here, an atmospheric blurring.

 Of the things I hear myself frequently say that I both loathe and lament it is the phrase I am so busy that sits alongside of its sister, I don’t have time. I want to scrub them from the surface of my mind, place my finger in the whirling fan that propels them round my insides, disinfect them from my heart before they end up as an etching on my headstone, the product of a 3D printer from an image generated by AI.

But for right now, I am here. In the museum, but beyond that still in it. I remind myself that the work is not to abandon. The work is to remain. To be present and to witness what is brutal. To bring forward the beautiful all and while you can.

The talk we have arrived for now begins. I am an enthusiastic question asker, my notebook open to a shiny and new page.

Why is it that New Zealand frogs have round eyes instead of the slit eyes, like all the other species?

Why is it they’ve evolved to not make sound?

And perhaps, most importantly,

What is this fungus that you mentioned that is wiping them all out? The forests we are losing? Can you tell me more of that?

The replies:

I’m not sure

I really don’t know

and

I’m afraid I don’t know what it’s called.

So, I’m sitting at the table, in the café, and I am sad about the frogs.

I’m sitting at the table, in the café, and I am sad that a talk about a creature so precious can be reduced to the reading out of facts, with answers that are not known beyond that which are outlined on the page. A filling in of time between the playground and a nap.

She’s sad about the frogs, I hear my boy say quietly to his brother once again.

I get up from the table, walk over to the counter, order a cup of tea.

 Along the way, I’m hunting for the glimmerings. No one round me knows this. I am a silent huntress. My footsteps tell me that if one is mired in doubt, it is then that the active cultivation of enchantment must be begin.

Huntress of Enchantment.

Huntress of The Glimmerings.

6.

Of all the fortune tellers, nature is by far the most accurate and reliable. She often takes us by the arm, reads our palms based on the number of creatures we unsettle when walking in the wetlands by the river.

Frogs, I read, are an ecological indicator.

7.

Once, in the unconscious sleep state we refer to as dreaming, I found myself in a white and open space, sitting in front of a half circle of women that I understood to all be my mothers. I am pregnant with my first child. They ask that I take my baby out, to allow them to better see.

At first I am confused, but then I find a way to follow their instructions. I unzip my skin from my throat down to my pelvis, take my baby out and place him gently on the table, in a place they all can see.

Light filled, light full, light-ening.

Comma, exclamation mark, full stop.

A splitting of the atom.

In this moment, I recognise myself as no longer singular.

I panic, scoop him up, place him back inside myself. The metamorphosis is unfolding but I’m not ready for it to begin.

I zip myself back up and leave the room.

Singular and split, together and apart.

8.

The Archey’s Frog, along with the other native frogs in Aotearoa New Zealand, do not have a free swimming phase in their cycle of life.

Their eggs appear as milky, gelatinous balls, in clusters of nine or ten. They skip the tadpole phase that is a part of the metamorphosis of all other frog species, and instead only hatch when their legs have started to appear.

They continue to be nourished by the yolk until they are about 8-12 mm long, at which point, we refer to them as froglets.

Froglets born of glassy orbs, so small they remain easily unseen.

Fortune tellers, spawned of crystal balls, hidden in the wetlands and the green.

9.

In

Dr Sharon Blackie

’s The Enchanted Life she writes,

In our native mythologies, animals are inextricably intertwined with both humans and gods- so much so that the ability to shapeshift from one to the other is taken to be perfectly natural. Old Irish literature abounds with humans who can shapeshift into creatures such as swans, fish, seals, horses and deer, blurring the boundaries of what we imagine still sets humans apart from the natural world.

To Become Frog, one who walks the forest floors of Aotearoa New Zealand, you must wait for the falling of the darkness. It is only now that you come out. You are there, behind a rock, a pile of Kawakawa leaves. You are silent, almost completely hidden by virtue of the markings on your skin.

 The side of your head bears no ears, your throat no vocal sac with which to make a sound.

Your movement is the only awareness a human eye, or that of a non-frog other, could hope to have that would allow the shape of your outline to become clear.

I have thought before about Becoming Wolf, Becoming Owl, Becoming Horse but never before about Becoming Frog. Often, when I allow myself to sink towards the liminal nature of my own existence, the vulnerable part of me rises up, an attempt to pretend myself back to the illusion of immortal. The ego part of self does her best to hang on tight.

Don’t let go of being human, it tells me, as though my human self is a protection from the realities of death, the silent and unseen.

But it’s at this point, if I allow myself to blend, to let go of what I think I know and what I don’t, to what I hear and what I imagine not to,  the outline of what is real and known starts to lose its definition;  

When the edges of my looking begin to blur, I feel that to be the point I start to see.

9.

I sit down and write:

The start of every human being’s becoming is aquatic.

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