Christina Rivera expresses anger, grief, and love for the state of Earth's ecosystems in 'MY OCEANS'.

One big potential of the divine masculine is being able to hold space for female creativity.

Imagining a care-based society is necessary before making it a reality.

When I launched Mothering Nature, I was motivated by killer whales, Orcinus orca. I was also driven by all I'd learned as a biologist, science writer, and mother in patriarchal systems, despite humans living most of our history in a matriarchy.

Orca are matriarchal. They are one of the few mammals besides humans to evolve non-reproductive grandmothers; they, too, undergo menopause, and orca grandmothers are life-or-death essential members of their families.

Christina Rivera's profound essay, "The 17th Day," limns the luminosity and motherlove shared by people and orca. When I saw her new book, MY OCEANS, I knew it might be a wisdom hymn for living today.

Rachel Clark: Could you briefly describe what drove you to write MY OCEANS?

Christina Rivera: In my book, there’s a true story of a time I happened upon a beached porpoise on the Pacific coastline of Costa Rica. I put my hands on the creature, looked it in the eye, and felt it die under my palms. Writing that sentence even now makes my eyes sting. Instead of looking away from that moment, I stared into it. Wrote through it. Used it as a portal to all my repressed feelings. Of great eco-grief. Of greater interbeing. The first draft that unrolled from my pen was a poem. (Mind you, I am not a poet.) Seven years later, the final draft that emerged was this wave-like series of lyric essays that all fit underneath the title, MY OCEANS.

RC: For me, reading MY OCEANS was a healing act. Even though you deal with some of the most difficult issues of our time, has writing it given you sanctuary amid the chaos we see today?

Do you have any sense of the reasons for that form of power?

CR: Writing the book gave voice to something inside me that needed to scream into what feels like an abyss. It shouldn’t be an abyss. It should be an ecosystem. If it were an ecosystem, my scream would be cushioned by moss, damp earth, and old-growth canopy. My scream would be returned by howls. What I think I’m trying to say is: There’s no place for my anger at the indignities I see in the world today. But writing this book gave me pages in which to explore and express my anger, then my grief, then my love. But it was a pilgrimage, and I could not skip through or ahead. I do hope the reader also feels this permission: to drop into these emotions and to re-emerge relieved, or at least lightened by the shared resonance.

RC: You write in the title essay, "My Oceans": “More than anything in the world, I want to ram whaling ships!” Can you speak to the urgency of that? Have you worked on board a Sea Shepherd ship yet?

CR: I still want to ram whaling ships. Some of my anger has been released (more so from guided meditations in Thich Nhat Hanh’s Engaged Buddhism), but the environmental urgencies are everywhere I turn. It’s overwhelming. But having a practice and a sangha (community of practice) has given me the boundaries I needed to buoy myself amidst the swirling urgencies. I’m still obsessed with eco-pirates and have only just realized there’s another entire book in me about them. So I’m building that concept and also planning some “experiential research.” So eco-pirating is still on my bucket list, but I do hope I’m getting closer!

RC: Whales are prominent in your book and life. What about them do you connect to?

CR: My love for whales feels ancestral. Like whales are in my bloodline, or my past lives. Past lives seem rather hopeful, but bloodline isn’t that far off, considering humans share 85 percent of their DNA with whales. Whale flippers have a basic bone structure similar to human hands. Whales carry relics of the same pelvic bones humans still use. Maybe they are more ancestor than not.

RC: You talk about how supportive your husband has been throughout your life. How does that play out for you, given the feminist themes of your book?

CR: My husband exemplifies so many “tough” masculine qualities (hunts, shoots, fixes, excels at sports), but he’s also confident in holding the space for my independence, my creativity, and—so importantly—he’s competent in holding the family together in my absence. I need periods of silence to be creative, to listen. Having a young family is not conducive to that type of silence, which makes stepping away (“my absence”) essential. That’s where I see the divine masculine has so much potential: in competently “holding space” for creativity. It’s a big conversation. Which is why I’m writing into it!

RC: You connect mystical inspiration to our capacity to heal ourselves and our planet. Could you share more about that?

CR: I love the concept of parallel worlds, and sometimes I imagine our current world as just one of a billion possibilities in an experiment where patriarchy fails. It makes me feel better to think that everything we’ve sacrificed here in this one sad reality could still contribute to making another world possible. Not just any world, but a glorious matriarchal reality—where the migrations of birds and whales and butterflies are religions, and the principles of care, and respect for biodiversity, thrive throughout the land. But to manifest that world, I also know we must first dream it.

So I do consider it my work to help imagine this one-in-a-billion world, where a care-based society arises—in a swift and “epic force”—to hold sacred all we can save. And regardless of the outcome, I am so happy to be on the team of all the artists and creators: painting, writing, dreaming, planting, and manifesting a care-based existence, into being.

In conversation with Christina Rivera. Rivera is the author of, MY OCEANS: Essays of Water, Whales, and Women, published by Curbstone Press in 2025. She is also a Pushcart Prize-winning essayist whose work has appeared in Orion Magazine, The Cut, Kenyon Review, Terrain.org, Bat City Review, and elsewhere. (Bio drawn from the author's website.)

The evolution of menopause in toothed whales. Nature. March 2024.

Killer whale moms protect their sons from fights with other whales. Science. Jul 2023.

Reawakening of Indigenous matriarchal systems: A feminist approach to organizational leadership. SageJournals. November 2023.

Postreproductive killer whale grandmothers improve the survival of their grandoffspring, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. Dec. 2019.

All We Can Save. Book, co-edited by Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Dr. Katharine K. Wilkinson (2021), and project.

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