Alert Circles
by Ella DeCastro Baron
Vex Caztro, Crownaday #54, paper, gold foil candy wrapper, marker, 2024. Courtesy of the artist.
Alert Circles
Ella DeCastro Baron | May 2025 | Issue 45
Last month, a 5.2 magnitude earthquake shook us awake. At first, Ndlula, Umngani, Khosi, and youngsters Zuli and Mkhaya scampered in different directions, bodies drumming the land’s growling belly. Each then bolted back to the enclosure’s center. Backing in, they faced out at the world beyond the San Diego Zoo. The herd of African elephants formed an “alert circle” to protect their young and other kin.
There’s a story about Anthony Lawrence, who moved to Zululand with his wife and converted an old game reserve into an animal haven. Zebras, white rhinos, leopards, and rescued “delinquent” elephants lived in this sanctuary, no longer hunted by “apex predators” aka dumb egocentric BDE-(big dick energy)-masking-SDE (small…) humans. Lawrence slowly earned the trust of nine elephants, led by their matriarch Nana. When they agreed to stay, they thrived in Thula Thula, growing their family to twenty-one strong. Folks called Lawrence the “elephant whisperer.” He preferred “elephant listener” because he did not claim to have a “special talent.”
“I just listen,” he said.
When Lawrence had a heart attack and died, the elephants walked for two days across the sanctuary to arrive at the house, everyone awestruck. Twenty one “grey shapes” hovered. A worker marveled to Lawrence’s wife, “They’re here.”
Françoise Malby-Anthony said Nana and the other elephants looked at her, as if waiting, “for more than an hour,” making noises they used to communicate to her husband, “then marched up and down along the fence.”
The elephants filed back to the bush. If that is not remarkable enough, each year on the anniversary of Lawrence’s passing, Nana and the herd had returned to the house to honor one of their own.
His wife wrote, “I can still hear them. The rumbling that vibrated through the reserve that dry evening in March. Their grief-filled moans. The agitated movements of their ears.”
Grief circle.
I first heard of these elephants on The Telepathy Tapes podcast. It’s more clear nowadays that there are people who listen to, soak in, and somehow know that nonverbal communication and collective consciousness is real and all around us. This goes beyond human to human, traversing space (and time! IKR?) connecting us with more-than-human species. And there are those who insist that physical, measurable matter is what…matters in our world. They’d likely bark HOGWASH! I don’t think these folks sit around the fire exchanging quiet, knowing looks. Me? I lowkey try to stir my psychic abilities during long drives and insomniac nights.
Whales also grieve. Tahlequah, an orca, was observed carrying her dead offspring. In 2018, she swam her deceased female calf through the ocean for 17 days. This year, Tahlequah ferried another calf who died. Many of us hear these transoceanic whalesongs. Many of us hum with, thousands of leagues deep, I suspect.
I also suspect that you women notably, deeply relate to elephants and whales. We too make alert circles. We too bellow, rumble, and swim griefs we have birthed through oceans.
Here I am, using elephants and whales to draw you in, reader, so we can talk about what I really wanna: menopause.
You still here?
So far, humans observe five species of toothed whales who go through menopause, as do certain elephants, it appears. Scientists aren’t sure if elephants undergo menopause because in the wild, they are fertile decades longer than when in captivity. If this is true—that elephants stop reproducing when constrained—all the more props to their wisdom for persisting, for managing what it takes to care for their herd.
One reason scientists think whales go through menopause is the Grandmother Hypothesis. Grandmas help to feed and care for their grandkids so the mothers can continue to reproduce their genetic line. Post-reproductive females and their cronies lead matrilineal groups, teach how to find salmon, pass on survival wisdom, and protect younger males. To keep it real: both female and male orcas stay with their intergenerational pod, so not just the females. Orcas, represent!
This Grandmama theory isn’t one-size-fit-all, because chimpanzees—who also go through menopause—leave ASAP. They don’t stay to see their own daughters grow to give birth. They’re all, ByeGirlBye. Chimpanzee gotta chimp and zee the world.
One expert, “argues that women’s loss of fertility was simply an evolutionary response to men favoring younger mates.” This leading scientist on menopause and women’s fertility is…a MAN?! Ew.
A scientist on the TED Radio Hour said the human brain goes through upgrades. For females who have uteruses (if you’re wondering, “uteri” also works), there are three possible times of leveling up: puberty, childbirth, menopause. Males upgrade only once, during puberty.
During menstruation, our brains meditate, introspect. What happens when we stop having this cycle? Is this when we really pause?
Men on pause
Men on paws.
Men, on. Pass!
Moon on pause
My friend in perimeno was walking out of the market with armfuls of canned goods. She flashed back to her mom stockpiling food. Her mom grew up in the aftershock of the Great Depression.
This friend cried in the parking lot, surprising herself. “I have the instinct now,” she shared with us later. “With epigenetics, I was an egg in my grandmother’s body. These were the times when everyone made do. Sewing, crafting, baking, pickling, preserving. These essential skills made essential workers out of my grandmother, mom, and me. I have taught my own daughters to make something out of nothing.”
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The spinning circle in the top right corner when our computers are thinking is called a loading throbber.
Another girlfriend’s brain upgrade, also mid-loading throb [that’s what she said] commiserates. Joint pain, plantar fasciitis, tweaked back. The brain fog and slog, having to play charades and Pictionary to figure out…today.
Girlfriend, let’s call her, Throb Lowe: “What is the thing that holds food and keeps it cold?”
Her partner, standing next to it: “Um. Fridge?”
Next morning, she texted: “I figured out three non-negotiables to help us get through this week when my parents visit.” After 25 years together, they’ve got this down.
Partner, a few hours later: “Got your text. What are the non-negotiables?”
Throbbelina: “FUCK IF I KNOW. That was when I knew things.”
Who Turned Fifty—WTF—during the Coronavirus Lockdown? Me. I was none the wiser. I blamed the Global Pandemic for my uppity uptick in heart palpy all-nighters, binging Tiger King and matching my paranoia with How To Get Away With Murder. This was my “come down” after faking we’ll-be-okay-ness each day in our John Stamos-less full house. Our elementary, middle and high school kids Zoom-schooled, snark-walked miles of hills and dales in lieu of team sports, saaang every word of Hamilton while gobbling mountains of strawberry cheesecake pancakes.
“There’s a million things I haven’t done, just you wait.” Youth. Resilience. Revolution.
It eventually dawned on me that maybe my body woes and oh no’s might be something other than Pandemic foreboding. Almost all of my friends in their 40s and 50s were tryna be about our lives when knock knock searing dry eye pain knock knock frozen shoulder can't unlock the door for us KNOCK KNOCK tinnitus can you hear us knock knock terror at 3 am, 4 am, 5 am. It’s probably cancer or riiing rrrriiing death of a beloved. Why did you watch Tiger King and think you were okay?
A year into unmitigated screeching, whooshing, siren sounds that were no doubt, “all in my head,” I needed more than telemedicine. A doctor shared shamanic healing ways during an online workshop. A chiropractor, acupuncturist, and native Filipino healer known as a hilot, Dr. Cat ended with an invitation. “If you’re in San Diego, come visit me.” Through thick static, I sensed a hopeful note.
My body stretched out on the amethyst-lined table, Dr. Cat pierced hair-thin needles on my ears to ‘tune’ the tinnitus, tune-itus. In Traditional Chinese Medicine, the ear is a fractal of a human body, a baby in the womb.
We treat the organs by releasing and moving stuck chi, your energy flow. The hilot left me on the table to buzz and pulse. Soon, a knowing radiated a promise: my tinnitus will not be empty, imperialist “white noise” but the messages being cultivated in this season of my life. Listen to “re-member our long body.” These transmissions come from across the deep.
Two years later, I was ready to dial in and learn hilot ways, to tend to myself and loved ones. Dr. Cat took a few of us hiking in Tecolote Canyon. She showed us how the Kumeyaay likely picked just enough wild greens and lemony berries to be fed while in mutual relationship with the land. We cupped stems, telepathically sought permission to pick a few leaves of sage. We wanted to bundle them with bayabas. Filipinos integrate bayabas, or guava, as indigenous medicine in similar ways.
I am a body of bodies from two shores. We twined the leaves with string. More bayabas leaves were steeped for tea. We invited our ancestors to join us. We sang “Bahay Kubo” to co-conspire, weaving a transoceanic homeplace in our midst. At night, we sipped hot coconut cream and cacao grown’n’flown from the Motherland. We opened our hearts, an ear curling in the center.
Go home and eat sweet potatoes, other root veggies, bulbs and foods nourished by the earth, the hilot advised. It’s time to train your body to hunger for things that grow in the ground. Geophytes, earth plants, are “disaster readiness kits” that embody whatever’s needed. Sink, get back to the dirt, to the beginning of everything. Even at the “end” of this type of fertility, menopause signals the next laborings.
I could feel my agitated ears, then my whole body twitch. Like the elephants, I want to listen for immanent guidance, how to stand with and protect my kin. Dark-skinned bodies. Broken. Queer and trans bodies. Bodies in captivity. Daughter bodies. Alert circle. To this day, my tinnitus sings discordant lamentations. We carry colonial wounds, diasporic wonders, births and deaths. Sonic rumblings. Grief circle.
Early in the Pandemic, my dream WTF birthday was to see the Northern Lights with girlfriends. Instead of flying to Canada, we sheltered-in-place. I grounded in bed, frozen. Moon on pause. Our daughters knocked on the bedroom door late one night. They draped me in a knit cap and long down jacket. They ferried me to the living room, my stunned body delivered to the carpet awash in blankets.
Shadowy silhouettes, mountains and trees, pointed up to the Northern Lights. A video projected the orchestra of light onto all the walls and vaulted ceiling. The electrified, smeared rainbow of pink, purple, and greens swished, rippling their night dance. Tears melted my icy cliff face. I crumpled on a soft landing of joyous fur-capped teens, proud as punch in puffy jackets. They encircled me with stuffies from years of science museum visits: purply glitter sea turtle, arctic wolf, loveworn narwhal, penguins galore.
Aurora borealis is a plasma, both a solid and liquid state of being. An in-between. So is the space between planets, between stars. Lightning and prayer, too. I am listening to dirt and water, trying to catch the signature of the cosmos.
We sipped a thermos of hot cocoa with extra big marshmallows and pointed up, up, UP and around the indoor night sky, now hundreds of miles high. Bright green-yellows frothed and curled, a slow-rolling wave. A procession of spectral beings swirled up, down, around. I opened my arms. What did they want to teach us?
Our youngest eyed a whirling whale and close to her, “Aww, lookit her cute baby!”
I wept and wept, utterly held. We were safe in our enclosure. We faced out at the world and swayed along, soaring and submerged.
Ella deCastro Baron (she/siya/we) is a 2nd gen Filipina American raised on Coastal Miwok lands (Vallejo, California). She teaches Composition, Literature, and Creative Writing. Her books are, Subo and Baon: A Memoir in Bites, and Itchy Brown Girl Seeks Employment. A woman of color who lives with chronic dis-ease, Ella honors sensations, dreams, story, dance, and decolonial truth-telling so we can ‘re-member our long body.’ She conspires with art-ivists to produce kapwa (deep interconnection) gatherings that stir love and justice via writing, art, joy, grief-tending, movement, food (yes!) and community. Her favorite pronoun, now more than ever, is We.
Vex Kaztro, aka Aglibut Bagaoisan, is an artist/writer of mixed pilipinx ancestry. Their work plays with the threads of trauma that erupt from queer neurodivergent identities living in the cozy liminal spaces of a cracked and unreliable memory. They studied filmmaking at City College of San Francisco and San Francisco State University.