It started with a simple tweet of mine on X regarding doing research for one’s writing projects. I’d met Isabella Mori a few years ago, when we both contributed to an ekphrastic anthology of flash fiction, inspired by Group of Seven art. We met again when she submitted a story to an anthology I was editing for Exile Editions. After my tweet on research, Isabella and I traded brief stories about rewrites based on research findings and ‘mistakes’ and the arcane revelations in the creative process that may result. I was intrigued by her recounting and asked her to share it with you; so here it is:

“Synchronicities And The Sea” by Isabella Mori

(Trigger warning: Substance use and suicide)

This is about the magic that comes to pass when we let the Muse guide our work and consent to synchronicity. Here is what happened:

When I go away on vacation, I try to visit the local library, and always make sure to check out the community announcements. On one of those forays, I came across a notice of a project that teamed up visual artists with writers for a short story or poem. I love these types of collaborations and immediately jumped on it. Max was the artist I paired up with, and we hit it off right away. After a few conversations, we settled on the painting below, for which I was going to write a story. As you can see, it had a moody, dark feeling. I drafted this text as a response:

The memory of a map showed her the way as she wandered, blinded by the night, along the shore. Numb with cold, her bare feet dug into the wet sand. She could not see that she left no tracks. There was something in her searching; she felt it in the deep pit of her stomach but there was no image in her mind’s eye of what it was, no tinkling that alerted her, no smell, no taste. A sense of despair drained the blood from her heart and tugged at her from the right, where the forest rushed. Foot-dragging ennui invited her onto a soft-moss carpet to the left, and thoughts of numbers, cars and cash register receipts tried to wrangle her back to where she came from. She was near giving up. But at that precise moment there tracked the light only she of the searching could see—a light bigger more forceful than giants could ever imagine; all-embracing, all-revealing, all-nurturing just like the frothy ocean beneath it, just like the sand with its fierce sparkle, each grain a diamond just like the heart-bud that could not help but open under its rays, under those rays that only she of the searching could see.

However, for reasons we have both forgotten, Max decided to lighten the colours, and the dark mood of the first draft didn’t fit anymore. This is the version we ended up with:

Walk With The Angels

The ocean has known her share of angels over the eons. They come and go but the tide is older. When an angel appears in a cloud of glistening light, beats its wings and brings out the trumpets, little humans fall to their knees and beg for mercy and miracles.

But the water stays still.

Great mother ocean has seen it all.

She waits until the angel grows tired, then she takes the worn-out wings and heavenly body into her arms and carries them into her depths. Brings the apparition to visit kelp, salmon, starfish, barnacles, otters and crabs. Anemones. Killer whales. A visit one by one, under the summer sun, beneath the light of the Hunter’s moon, when the snow falls, with the Easter rains. The angel leaves a bit of themselves here, a bit there, a gift everywhere, until only the tiniest of diamonds are left.

And that’s the sand.

Walk with the angels.

There were a few tweaks before we arrived at this text, the major one being that in a previous version, I referred to ‘angel dust’ for the sand until the editor pointed out that that term refers to a street drug, PCP. In my enthusiasm I had forgotten that.

The change away from ‘angel dust’ was very important. When Max read the new version, they called me, their tone of voice both moved and perturbed.

“When I read this,” they said, “it feels like you channeled what happened with my cousin last year, not far from the place that inspired my painting. She had had problems with drugs all her life, and one day she just walked into the ocean. Her body was found a day later.”

Under those circumstances, we definitely did not want to refer to drugs.

That story stayed with me for months until one day when I was listening to one of my playlists of Latin music. I lived in Paraguay and Chile 1977-1980, and often enjoy the nostalgia of the music I listened to back then. The first song that came on was one of my all-time favourites, Alfonsina Y El Mar – Alfonsina And The Sea. Now I have to confess, I am terrible with lyrics, no matter what language, whether it be my native German, English, or the Spanish I was fluent in for quite a few years. For some reason, I really listened to the song last summer, and then looked up the lyrics. That’s when it hit me – was it possible that the lyrics of that song had subconsciously influenced me to write the second text? Or was it one of those Jungian collective conscious moments?

Alfonsina And The Sea

(Music: Ariel Ramirez. Lyrics: Felix Luna)

In the soft sand
Licked by the sea
Her small footprints
Don’t return.
Just one path
Full of pain and silence
Led to the water,
Deep water,
And one single path of unspoken pain
Led to the foam.

God knows what sorrows accompanied you,
What old suffering shut down your voice
That made you lie down and nestle into the songs
Of the sea snails,
The song that sings in the deep dark of the sea,
The sea snail.

There you go, Alfonsina, with your loneliness,
What new poems did you go find?
An old, old voice of wind and salt
Sways your soul and carries it
And you go there dreaming,
Sleeping, Alfonsina, clothed in the sea

Five little sirens will carry you
Through passages of algae and corals
And glowing sea horses will dance
Around you
And all the creatures of the sea will soon
Play at your side.

Turn down the light a little more,
Nurse, let me sleep in peace.
And when he calls tell him I’m not in,
Tell him Alfonsina won’t come back.
And when he calls don’t ever tell him I’m in,
Tell him I’m gone.

There you go, Alfonsina, with your loneliness,
What new poems did you go find?
An old, old voice of wind and salt
Sways your soul and carries it
And you go there dreaming,
Sleeping, Alfonsina, clothed in the sea.

(Used with permission, my translation.)

Alfonsina ended up in the ocean just like Max’s cousin did.  

With some research, I found out that the story was about the Argentinian poet Alfonsina Storni who, after a difficult life that included poverty, questions she had about gender identity, and breast cancer, one night wrote a last poem to her son and then let herself fall into the ocean amid torrential rain. (An  apocryphal version has her just walk into the ocean, and that’s the one the lyricist chose.) Some of that last poem was incorporated into Alfonsina Y El Mar – the nurse who is asked to lower the light, and told to tell ‘him’ that she won’t come back. Nobody seems to know who ‘he’ is.

The other research that had to happen was to find who the inheritors of Felix Luna’s estate were to obtain permission should I tell the story that you have before you. It turned out to be his daughters. Then I had to sleuth out their contact.

Felix Luna, the lyricist, imagined Alfonsina’s death not only as the terrible tragedy that it was but also as a mystical transformation into a sea creature that nestles into the songs of the sea snails. She finds new poems and sleeps clothed in the sea. She is embraced by sirens and wanders through algae and corals. She dances with sea horses and plays with all the other sea creatures.

I definitely cannot compare myself with a great poet like Felix Luna but notice with humility the similarities of my transformed angel who sinks into the embrace of mother ocean and also visits the more-than-humans of the sea.

I went pregnant with the idea of writing about the experience of Max’s and my collaboration for half a year when in February, I chanced upon a tweet by Nina about research for writing. I met Nina through submitting a story to an anthology she was editing. I told her about needing to tweak the angel story so that it does not talk about angel dust and ended up telling her the outline of what happened. She invited me to write a guest post about this, and here we are.

So many synchronicities. I could have not gone to that library. A different artist could have been paired up with me. Max could have wanted to stay with the original painting. Or they could have chosen a painting that would not have reminded them of their cousin. They could have opted not to share that sad story with me, or they could have been paired up with someone who doesn’t understand suicide as intimately as I do (I look back on a 30+ year career in social services.) I could have heard Alfonsina Y El Mar and still not really listened to the lyrics. There was no guarantee I could have managed to find out from whom to get permission to quote the song. I could not have submitted a story to one of Nina’s anthologies, and could not have followed her on Twitter. Coming across the particular tweet that prompted the publication of this story was like chancing upon a needle in a haystack. All this, and probably more, had to come together for this magical synchronicity to happen.

Thank you, Muse.

(Note: Since this is a sensitive topic, the artist’s name and some of the circumstances of my collaboration with them have been changed. However, the artist has consented to using their images.)

Isabella Mori writes fiction, poetry and nonfiction, and is the author of three books of and about poetry, including A bagful of haiku – 87 imperfections. Isabella’s work has appeared in publications such as State Of Matter,  Kingfisher, Signs Of Life, Presence, and The Group Of Seven Reimagined. Isabella is the founder of Muriel’s Journey Poetry Prize, which celebrates socially engaged poetry. A book about mental health and addiction is planned for publication with Three Ocean Press in 2024. They live on the unceded, traditional and ancestral lands of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh people aka Vancouver, BC.