Where fresh water meets salt

Jenner-Sebastopol, California

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The little California town of Jenner hangs from the cliffs where the Russian River meets the Pacific. Approach it from the south, following the bends of Highway 1, and you'll come to a sign that states that the population is 107, which seemed like a fine number to me. Drive through Jenner and return from the north, and you'll be informed by the sign at that end of town that the population is 170. That's a pretty big difference.
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I pulled up at the River's End for clarification and liquid refreshment. "This seems to be liminal teritory," I remarked to the civilized bartender as he worked the tap on a local amber ale. "You have a floating population."
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"Our signpainter is dyslexic," he said. "The census might clear it up, or might not." In fact, Jenner is famous for one type of floating population: the harbor seals that gather here in great numbers in May. I was a few weeks too early to see them.
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Out on the deck, I inspected the place where the Russian River - slow and gentle at this point, but feared for sudden floods twenty miles up stream - meets the ocean. A place where fresh water meets salt water is liminal in one of the most important and mythic senses. In imaginal geographies, this is often a preferred point of entry into the Otherworld. In my twelve years of leading retreats at the Esalen Institute, down the California coast at Big Sur, I often had participants study how the cold, fresh water of the creek splashing down through the ravine, meets the Pacific, among the rocks. Then, with the aid of shamanic drumming, I would invite them to take off from this point in a visionary journey to make the crossing to the Other Side, have timely and helpful communication with people on the other side of death, and learn about conditions in the afterlife through first-hand experience.

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"I've seen sharks come up the Russian River," says the bartender when I go back inside. "Of course, they don't stay for long."

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Could that be a great white out there, among the whitecaps? I'm not sure, though I've heard that great whites breed in these waters and are often seen. But I've felt the nearness of the shark since I arrived in California. The night before Jenner, a woman shared what she called the most powerful dream of her life. Swimming in a warm ocean, she found something brushing against her and discovered it was a great white. The shark told her it would protect her and proceeded to open its jaws and hold her inside its mouth. She rested there, safe and cozy as a baby in its crib, throughout the night and rose in the morning feeling wonderful.

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I asked her if anyone in her family or circle of friends had been challenged by cancer. She mentioned a couple. I observed that if this were my dream and my family situation, I might feel that I had not only been granted the personal protection of a powerful ally, but might be able to draw on ths relationship to help others. The shark doesn't get cancer, and I have found that if I can encourage a cancer patient to picture a shark swimming through the courses of her body, devouring the cells of her disease, she often does better. The shark dreamer wanted to explore this.

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When I got to Sebastopol from Jenner and spoke at Copperfield's that evening, I told a story of transferring the healing power of the shark to a cancer patient - the one I recount at length in an essay titled "Time for the Shark God" that is posted in the Archives section at my website. In the morning, swimming in circling loops for two hours in an outdoor pool, I enjoyed the sensation of drawing the shark power close. When I arrived to open my "Dreamgates" workshop on Saturday morning, a car pulled up in front of me with a window decal that read "THUNDER SHARKS."

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My workshop host told me she had dreamed within the past week of an happy and empowering encounter with several kinds of shark, including the Australian sawtooth shark, the most primal and ferocious member of the species. This very ancient Aussie aquatic killing machine has something like a chainsaw on its nose and can pursue its prey - who might include both humans and crocodiles - up freshwater creeks by pumping out a saline solution that produces the salt water it needs. Now that's a bloody shark, mate!