Argonauts are practical magic.
Autumn 2024 | Volume 06 • Issue 2
This week I randomly opened my copy of Gift From the Sea to the Argonauta, also known as the Paper Nautilus shell. An Argonauta shell is a home created by a female octopus to safely hold her eggs, unlike the outgrown homes of snails and mussels we’re more familiar with in the fresh waters of the Great Lakes.
It was meaningful to discover this chapter the morning of my 8th wedding anniversary, learning about the shell that isn’t really a shell crafted by an eight-tentacled Argonaut octopus for her future children.
8 years, 8 tentacles.
God I love it when that happens.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh writes Gift From the Sea in chapters organized by each shell she found while beachcombing on vacation with her sister in the 1950s. In the Argonauta chapter she explains how previous shells — the double-sunrise seashell and the oyster bed — stood for earlier learnings in a marriage. A double-sunrise being “only intimate and personal”. The oyster bed being “caught in the particular and the functional”.
Lately, our marriage is an oyster bed by Lindbergh’s definition, caught in the particular and the functional, but the Argonauta is something to aspire to is it not? Hopeful to know there can be another evolution forthcoming.
And is it not the swinging of the pendulum between these opposite poles that makes a relationship nourishing? Yeats once said that the supreme experience of life was “to share profound thought and then to touch.” But it takes both.
[…] the argonauta, should they not be able to swing from the intimate and the particular and the functional out into the abstract and the universal, and then back to the personal again?
And in this image of the pendulum swinging in easy rhythm between opposite poles, is there not a clue to the problem of relationships as a whole? Is there not here even a hint of an understanding and an acceptance of the wingéd life of relationships, of their eternal ebb and flow, of their inevitable intermittency?
The more I research the Argonaut (oddly researchers have never found the male Argonaut), the more they are the epitome of practical magic. Speaking of…
Practical Magic by Alice Hoffman
Practical Magic by Alice Hoffman | My annualish viewing of the movie inspired this selection for September. I rarely watch the movie adaptation before the novel but I didn’t know there was a novel until recently. The biggest difference between the movie and novel is the setting; the story takes place in Sally’s home a few hours away from the Aunt’s home on the East Coast. The Aunts travel to Sally and Gillian, not the other way around.
Some things, when they change, never do return to the way they once were. Butterflies, for instance, and women who’ve been in love with the wrong man too often.
The wrong man relates to Gillian and her poor choice of men, particularly the one she killed and buried in her sister’s backyard. This quote resonates with me more deeply in relation to my journey of becoming a Mother. I keep wanting to go back — I want my hips back in the place where jeans held them more kindly, my breasts before nursing, my stamina on a 3-mile run, clarity of my mind to finish a thought and know it is a solid one. I want to go back to when basic activity didn’t conclude with an ailment each time. When my husband and I would widdle away a Saturday in bed until noon, only leaving each other’s side because we were famished and it was time to widdle away more time on the beach.
Some things, when they change, never do return to the way they once were.
In the celebration of having our daughter, having what I’ve deeply wanted with my husband, I’ve avoided my shadow feelings. They come out in all sorts of wonky ways if you don’t look them in the eye. Similar to the way Jimmy came out through the blooming lilacs. Then the thorns after Sally hacked away the lilacs. Only a healing ritual from the wisdom of the Aunts and support from other women could rid his ghost from Gillian’s spirit. She had to face it, you know, all those shadow feelings haunting her so she could trust good, good love. Sally had to also, as did her daughters.
After complaining I always get the urge to round it out with something positive. Are we never supposed to acknowledge things are hard? Sometimes they suck, even the dreams from those lazy beach days, hearing children’s laughter the next towel over and longing for a child of our own to laugh with. She is here. And some things, when they change, never do return to the way they once were.
It’s ok to hold grief in one hand and joy in the other. The grief is stubbornly holding on, unwelcomed, in my neck today. It didn’t get the memo to place itself in my hand so I can chuck it out the car window later but whatever, grief is a real asshole.
Grief is also necessary to move through. At your own pace. In your own time.
From the very start, Sally has been lying to herself, telling herself she can handle anything, and she doesn’t want to lie anymore. One more lie and she’ll be truly lost. One more and she’ll never find her way back through the woods.
Practical Magic led the way for me this week.
I’m now cramming The Wedding People in time for Book Club tonight but wow, what a problem to have. Here’s what’s in between my bookends this season:
If you liked this longer book review you may like my short-form reviews & other bookish things on my Instagram.
✌🏼 In peace & books,
