Whales and Wholeness

I have been lucky enough to be graced by seeing these creatures up close, in real life, from my parent's sailboat (ENGINE OFF!), and to hear them communicating through my dad's home-made hydrophone. We watched them splashing and playing from a distance, and then they came right up to the boat, swimming underneath it and around it, and a giant four-foot fin glided right along the stern where I was standing. If I had been ready and willing, I could have reached out to touch it.

I always regard that day as one of the best days of my life. What a privilege to live among such powerful creatures in this world.

This is why I feel what I feel (anger and indignation at humanity's continual abuse of the living earth); why I believe what I believe (that harmful human processes must be stopped at any human cost in order for the living earth to continue living); and why I do what I do (activism and awareness raising, calling for radical personal and systematic change to our lifestyles, worldviews, and power structures).

I see myself, and humanity, as a member of a life community. We must stop acting as though our voice is the only one that matters, that our choices, our drive, our technology supersede the rights of other creatures, other beings (water, air, plants, trees, microbes included) to exist and flourish in in-tact ecosystems, unpolluted, unfractured, WHOLE.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPXdHEhnhSY&desktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DwPXdHEhnhSY&app=desktop

Cooperation

"Dinner for two: Each evening after a hard-day's hunting this pair of unlikely friends met for supper"

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2443974/Bear-WOLFs-unlikely-friendship-caught-camera-photographer.html#ixzz2hInEZSO6

 

What I see:

Cooperation

which I believe is engrained in the evolution of life as much as competition, and is just as necessary to survive. And I think we will see more of this--animals banding together whether for survival (in an increasingly depleted environment) or perhaps companionship (in an increasingly lonely landscape). It makes sense to see this behavior popping up, in both wild animals and animals in captivity, as humans have mostly removed ourselves from a cooperative stance with the rest of life, and maintain short-sighted activities of destroying habitats/ecosystems/communities, and generally treat other lives only as resources or nuisances instead of neighbors to share with, learn from, and revere. The animals know better--they know we need each other. If we don't change our stance, then soon enough we will be the ones left completely on the outside of a web of interconnectivity and cooperation, with few ties to it and therefore little resilience against the shocks that will inevitably come in this changing world.

sun and rain

(from journal)

I stood in the sun and watched the deep grey clouds approach
the wind rushed through that stand of trees but not this one
I love the currents of motion that we can only see by hearing and can only hear by how it moves
another.
The sound of waves washing through the branches
And then the misty rains come with crisp air
filling me with the sacred connection of life, breath, air, water,
earth fills every crack of skin on my hands.
A rush of wave through my body as the sun slips
behind the deep grey--the color of comfortable sadness.
It holds me.
Straddling light and dark. Juxtaposition.
This is where the beauty of this world lies.
This is where I find the deepest love
and truth
and love.


I held in my hand, today,
a baby snake,
the size of a large worm.
I found him coiled up sweetly under a bed of pine needles.
I thought, at first, it was a millipede or some bug, or even a worm.
But as I picked it up it uncoiled and coiled again
and slithered across my hand. A snake.
He looked at my thumb as though he was looking in my eyes, with curious fear
or hope.
I didn't hold him long--this tiny beautiful
black-grey and yellow-orange snake.
I never knew a snake so small could exist.
His perfection, beauty, loneliness and contentment
almost brought me to tears.

And then the rain.
I love this dear world.