I received the following message many, many years ago on a cliff overlooking the ocean on Montauk Point. At the time I did not have the capacity to understand it fully, but it remained planted inside until very recent events ripped me open a bunch more and then it burst forth again with more clarity.

Blodughadda is not merely the red tide of battle waters, or of the bloody feedings of sea creatures. The Outcast is not born only out of the willful actions of man or beast, just like her sisters are not governed by people’s whims. Her hair is bloody because she is married to dying, yes, but whether it comes in the form of carnage, river-borne detritus, or imbalanced algae bloom she cares not. She is foam, the thick spume churned from earthly decay, wind and seawater. She is toxic, and she is cleansing.

Beware calm, still waters, she whispers, for they stagnate; the bloom may be bright but then the only way forward is dying, and its poisons rain down to the roots of things. Water is the World’s blood, but also its cleansing. Dirty dishwater, your human waste, even dead trees and beasts come home, too, in the ocean. Her sharks and crustaceans and smaller lives than those may scavenge the depths, but cannot eat all. What cannot be eaten is unclean, and the Outcast bears it away to the surface, throwing herself onto the land, exposed and disintegrating as the poisons transmute into nourishment outside the bounds of the ocean waters.

She is not only the blood but also the lymph. Moving, moving, dancing with her sisters, but even so always she is held apart by her nature, tainted and ugly with earthly rot and death stink. She is most separate coming at rest on shore, where she shatters in fierce union with the wind and transforms the rejected to food for life, life that then will die and find its way back to her home, both feeding and harming again. So, the dance starts anew. She dances, she sweeps, she fucks, she nourishes. She loves death as much she loves the wind because she cannot exist without either.

Always be moving like the rivers, she says. Quietness is deceptive, a gloss on the surface even as wrongness gathers below, sometimes in pieces too tiny to see until the sum of them paralyze and choke you.

She gave me no song, only this understanding, and then charged me to look below and bear up dis-ease of spirit, setting it free to the air so that it can, too, be transformed outside and feed new growth. Outcasts are just so because they touch what many around them cannot or will not, she tells me, and that in this we are kin, for often the price a person pays for using their voice is to sever their belonging. The price of not using it, she cautions, can be far more dire.