TIED ALL OR BIT OFF MORE THAN A GRAIN OF SALT If our sun were a basketball, the diameter of our yearly orbit as a planet would be about 530 feet, essentially a city block. In Tahuya, a small community on a Pacific Northwest peninsula, for the 2025 summer solstice performance art & community festival SHORT NIGHT, I walked this orbit for three hours around a basketball while the tide came in over a varied tide land, occasionally losing sight of the object and then needing to find my footing again. I did not represent the earth (because at this scale, the earth would be a mere grain of sand) but I traversed our orbit in a meditation of relationship with repetition, landscape, attention, and water.
MEMORY: a tiny white crab moves on the edge between the land and the stream that will reverse direction with the tide. I squat and twist with one arm raised to the sky, one in the water. in response to its sideways move. I repeat this response to the sideways dance, a new when I encounter it (or another) on subsequent orbits. MEMORY: a man picks up the basketball--the center of my universe -- and spins it. I did not plan for this but I know I must run, he tucks the ball under his arm and walks toward the water. I am running toward him a dangerous spiral, getting closer to the center . I finally shout that he needs to put it down, it is part of my ritual, it is my sun. His apology reveals his desire to clean up the rocky shore, his joy at such a find, his disappointment that he could not take this shining star home. MEMORY: a dead porpoise with bite marks on its side is washed up on a far berm of gravel, just at the edge of my adjusted orbit after the recentering of my universe. The land side looks nearly alive, the sea side looks like a horror movie. I visit this creature again and again, bringing ritual rocks to arrange around it on each orbit.
MEMORY: I slip on the oyster bed and cut my foot. I am bleeding but I do not want to stop the orbit. I call for a friend to join me on the orbit and we walk and when I am nearest to the spit, I ask her to continue the orbit while I find a bandage. I return, and she leaves me back to be a solitary planet
MEMORY: I pull up a bit of sea bean and chew it while I walk-- it is salty and tasty in this sunshine.
MEMORY: I see a hula hoop rolls toward me on the edge of my vision. This is the signal that three hours have passed. The people on the spit, in beach chairs, drinking coffee, look up from their conversations as I walk toward them but I am not ready to talk, for I have been looking at seaweed and oyster shells and tiny crabs, visiting the temporary grave of the wounded creature, walking miles slowly, each orbit a year for this planet.
MEMORY: Later when I am no longer performing my ritual, I walk through space where the basketball was and it is like a foreign land. I came to know the circle so well, its many neighborhoods, the places where I could still see my sun and where it would be just out of sight, the particular edges of the oyster beds, the size of the stones here and the contrast with the stones there. Now, taking the shortest way (on the shortest night) to where the tide is coming in closer to witness the next ritual, I feel dizzy in these tiny uncanny valleys of familiar topography that I have not seen yet so many times.