🎧 Waypoint 4.2 — The Wombfish

How sea-goddesses, dolphins, eggs, and fish with feet reveal the deep, watery origins we still carry within us.

What does it mean to remember that we come from the sea—and never fully left it?

In this episode, we descend from Lassen’s alpine slopes into deep time, following a trail that runs from mountain heather and melting snow into mythic oceans, ancient wombs, and the evolutionary improvisations that carried life from water to land.

Biology and mythology braid together as stories of Doris and the Nereids open into dolphins, eggs, placentas, gill slits, breath, and voice—revealing a lineage that links ocean, mother, and song.

This waypoint dwells on origins not as nostalgia, but as continuity: life adapting, carrying memory forward in soft tissues and borrowed forms.

Together, we trace:

• Alpine heather Phyllodoce, named for a sea-nymph, binding mountain and ocean.

• Doris, Nereus, and the Nereids—figures of flow, care, and transformation predating Olympian hierarchies.

• Delphus, the womb, and what the word dolphin reveals about mammalian kinship.

• Fish with feet, eggs, and the improvisation that led from mud to womb.

• Gill slits, umbilical cords, and aquatic structures repurposed into jaw, ear, and voice.

• Why dolphins sing their calves’ names—and why humans emerge from water learning to breathe and speak.

This waypoint asks what it means to belong to a lineage older than monuments and nations—carried not in stone, but in breath, blood, milk, and memory.

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