what the dolphins are still teaching me
what the dolphins are still teaching me
returning to a sense of our ecological beingness
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I have always been a creature of water. From my early days of vacations to the Black Sea, to swimming in the rivers and lakes in the mountains of Romania, to taking to playing in puddles arriving home smelling of green mud that my mother had me strip down at the front door and carried me “by a wing” (as she said it) into the tub, water has summoned and i have answered.
I live landlocked now in a sense, the closest ocean about a four-hour drive, so i find my way to rivers again. Or, at times to the lakes only twenty minutes from where i live, though i prefer water that moves. I have now traded the surf board for the paddle board, chagrined and longing, and yet grateful to have something to buoy me.
My life’s most sacred experiences have come from water – birthing, nearly drowning twice, one of the times, sucked into the deep by six-foot-tall shore break, my face buried in a sandbank. I was four years old and more scared of the tiny beads that stung my eyes, than of the great arms of the water that had snatched me.
Other kinds of experiences too. One, early in the days of learning to surf, when i was hanging out with a group of friends just beyond the breakers, a pod of dolphins came to play with us. Two babies among seven or eight adults. The babies bumped our boards playfully, knocking us off and then swimming away, while the adults watched protectively, some arcing above us sending sprays of shimmering droplets, their bodies lithe and powerful. For the first time, my perception of how “cute” dolphins are shifted to awe, to a holy fear of their largeness, their speed, their wildness.
Something in me fizzled and popped-- perhaps the part that anthropomorphized or objectified them. And, something blossomed – awakened by their aliveness, their wondrous movement and presence, so potent we cried and laughed and cried again and again and again. Our own sense of sacred aliveness rebirthed in those moments together. They wanted to play. They lived to play. I felt their invitation, loud and joyous harkening back to a time where i was moved by this one impulse also.
When did humans create this unfortunate dichotomy of work and play? When did we become so serious and cynical that we gave up joy in order to accomplish?
It strikes me too how play is one of the most intricate, effortfull+effortless spaces that garner our deepest imaginings, stirs our wildest creativity, and teaches us cooperation, resourcefulness, connection, negotiation, and delight.
What if we took down the false binary of work and play? What if our work became our greatest delight? What if being alive was more than enough and everything else flowed from that? From being. From our enoughness.
By the way, i’ve been orienting my life toward delight over and over again lately. It’s a robust practice from the conditioned labor and accomplishment intensive ways of being that were my modus operandi for three decades.
It is the slow-blossoming lesson of the dolphins.
We played with them for a while, and later, when my friends and i landed on the beach, our silence was a cathedral, a balm. We collapsed on the sand together, warming our bodies in the stark sun and reached for each other, hands entwined as we pondered and slept.
I’ve had other dolphin encounters since, but none quite as intimate as this one. None where i felt the dolphins speaking, showing us a truth so intoxicating i’ve never quite “recovered”.
As the evangelical faith of my childhood frayed in the face of life experiences so wondrous and heartbreaking the old systems couldn’t hold them, i began to consciously examine how growing up in the Anthropocene undergirded by religious ideology that promoted mastery of the earth had impacted me.
There were, sadly, the larger ways in which i participated in a consumptive culture without understanding the cost to the planetary eco-system. Those i continue to disengage from while searching for creative and inter-relational ways to do the basic things of life – eat seasonal food, trying to grow some, or form relationships with local farmers engaging in sustainable practices; care for our land without the use of chemicals; try to use little to no plastic; find recycling practices and places that led to actual recycling. The list is long and we’re stumbling into a better way.
What was even more arresting to me were the subtle ways i and those around me related to nature. Even when there was enjoyment of her beauty, it still had an element of consumption, like nature is here for us. That never resonated with my being, though i also intellectually bought into this notion of mastery, tempered by a sort of benevolent, caretaking energy that didn’t lead to a ruthlessness of consumption, but neither did it acknowledge the sentience, vitality, and divine nature expressed in all living matter, from the soil with its microcosm of bacteria and exquisitely intelligent mycelium, to all plants, animals, humans, stars, and to the unseen realms filled with creatures beyond our imagination.
What i felt into my marrow was that we, humans, are nature, a part of this luminous web, given to each other in the inter-connectedness and inter-subjectivity of a mutual desire – to create the means for flourishing.
Communities of enlivenment.
I borrow this term from Andreas Weber, philosopher and biologist, whose work has been with me for some time now, giving language and undergirding with research some of the intuitions and revelations i’ve had through the years. He defines enlivenment as “seeing all beings in a common household of matter, desire, and imagination, an economy of metabolic and economic transformation.” This is a perspective that transcends the human-nature antithetical dualism. Rather, it invites to a deeper experience of inter-subjectivity arising in response to a living, breathing, holographic universe, where life force, the energy that animates all matter, inextricably connects us.
Where we must pause and return to something native and close to the bone in order to remember. To reclaim the language that shimmers through our bodies and calls us with siren song to our blueprint. Our essence. Below the imprints of culture, religion, political systems, and structures of domination.
And certainly, not all imprints are problematic in the way that there are many aspects to human culture that are an essential part of our evolutionary journey into manifesting deeper compassion, equality, justice, and creativity. Though of course, all these exist in the mosaic of the natural world in ways that are exquisite and surprising, from the repeated and built upon harmonies of songs that perpetuate whale culture, to the cooperation and strong bonds of the bonobos, to the mating habits of swans, or the way snow leopards tend to their young. The thread of love is woven through all that is wild and free.
On a different occasion, i took my paddleboard out on the sound side of James Island. Two dolphins came to play as i rode against the incoming tide trying to keep up with their speed, their intricate dance. One approached me and i slowly slipped into the water to see her better. She circled me and came close ever so gently that her fin brushed against my leg. Two seconds later she took off carried by a current i couldn’t see but felt agains my own body, witnessed in the way she glided through the water as if moving through folds of silk. I then let myself find a current to take me back to the docks, content to lie on my board watching the storm clouds canopy over me and drink in the rain.
On Gaza
Yesterday, i cried on my yoga mat for an hour thinking of the 13,000 children, 40,000 humans dead in Gaza. My soul felt like a worm husk shriveled in the sun. Life seems so pointless in the face of such atrocity and suffering, and the wailing and gnashing of teeth was a river of grief larger than my body coming through. I had just nursed my daughter, safe and flushed and smiling in my arms. I clung to her inhaling the baby scent that lingers still though she’s almost one now, and thought who am i ? and what do we do?
But we cannot give in to despair. We don’t have that luxury in the face of such loss. So, i ask us, where is our power to do something? What is our sacred responsibility to each other? Our response-ability?
So, i come back to our aliveness, letting the knowing of our inter-dependance dawn on us again and again, so that the boundary between self and other melts in the heat of loving. Loving neighbor as self, because my neighbor is myself.
Grieve. Rest. Integrate. Donate. Pray with and without words.
Let the resonance of your heart awakened by silence and stillness join the hearts and energies of those who are holding our planet.
