Month: February 2021

A beautiful teaching from the wisdom of 🐬 dolphins!

Being Here

The natural world has so much to teach us about God, ourselves, and our connection to one another. Scholar and artist Alexis Pauline Gumbs shares wisdom from dolphins:  

Here we are, where presence meets offering, looking to Indus river dolphins who live by constantly using sound to mark where they are. . . . What could it mean to be present with each other across time and space and difference? Presence is interpersonal and interspecies and intergalactic, in some ways eternal. How can we rethink our presence on the planet and its precarity by paying attention to how the Indus dolphins have brought themselves back from the brink of extinction? Could we learn to love the humpback whale beyond its marketable mythology and love ourselves beyond what capitalism tells us is valuable about being us? Marine mammal mentorship offers us the chance for presence as celebration, as survival and its excess, as more than we even know how to love about ourselves and each other.

Most cetaceans have a crystalline lens over their eyes so they can see underwater. The South Asian river dolphins do not. Also the water moves so quickly, and is so full and turbid that not much would be visible if they were looking with their eyes. So they look instead with their voices.

The Indus and Ganges river dolphins live in sound. They make sound constantly, echolocating day and night. In a quickly moving environment they ask where, again where, again where.

The poem of the Indus river dolphin is the ongoing sound of here, a sonic consciousness of what surrounds them, a form of reflective presence. Here.

The home of the Indus river dolphin has gone through many manmade changes. . . . . Through all of it, the Indus river dolphin, who clicks all day and night, has been saying, here. Here. Here. Here. In a language I want to learn. . .

In the language I was raised in, “here” means “this place where we are,” and it also means “here” as in “I give this to you.” Could I learn from the Indus river dolphin a language of continuous presence and offering? A language that brings a species back from the brink, a life-giving language? Could I learn that? Could we learn that? We who click a different way, on linked computers day and night? . . .

What I want to say to you . . . requires me to reshape my forehead, my lungs. It requires me to redistribute my dependence on visual information. So I will close my eyes and say it: Here. Here I am. Here I am with you. Here is all of me. And here we are. Here. Inside this blinding presence. Here. A constant call in a moving world. Here. All of it. Here. Here. Humbly listening towards home. And here. And here. Right here. My poem for you. My offered presence. This turbid life. Yes. Here you go.

How might we offer to be “here” for ourselves, someone else, or the world around us today?

Experience a version of this practice through video and sound.

Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals (AK Press: 2020), 67‒69.

A friend sent this link to a new compilation of love stories to plants and trees that I just love! In this time of winter redux (last week I was posting budding trees, this week we’re buried under snow!) – it is a wonderful reminder of our beloved nature family and the many ways they show up for us.

I am forever filled with joy by these first brave harbingers of the coming spring.

The amazing sacred manuscript of Nature once again splendidly manifests its potency, resilience, and persistent life energies.

This sacred manuscript of Nature again blesses us with the reminder that we too can rise again, we too can blossom in spectacular creativity, even after the dark and cold have encouraged us into hibernation and needed rest in the healing soil of the mother.

The cycle of life coaxes us back into the sun and we remember our own potency and resilience in these trying times.

We are truly blessed.

I have been blessed last week with an opportunity to rest in deep silence in the mountains and forests around Lake Coeur de Alene in Idaho.

We call this silent meditation, “khilvat” in our Sufi tradition, and I was held by my dear teacher Saladin and in the container of 13 other beloveds for a full week of deepening.

Resting in that beauty I found myself reminded of the cycle of distress, fear, and anger that is so often elicited by the workings of our world as it slides and stumbles through this painful dark night and birth canal which is our current reality.

I was gifted with practices that allowed me to move from that state of pain to acceptance of the Divine One as the only compassionate, omniscient, all-knowing power that has the true ability to re-balance, and to access the flow of that balancing energy, as it surrounded me in natural beauty.

I also had a wonderful and shocking wake-up call from the full moon early Thursday morning, which elicited the following poem.

Rude Moon

Well before dawn
Spotlight moon rudely
Kicked my ass
Out of bed.

Cowering beneath her glare
Shivering in the frozen night
The interrogation began…

“Just who do you think you are?”
She inquired.
“What makes you think it’s ok to sleep
Through my magnificent glory!”
“And where were you at 5:30 am
On January 28th, 2021! Hmm!?”

I mumbled
I stammered
I might have whined
And moaned a bit…

But then I lifted my eyes
(After checking my watch)
And boldly spoke
into her blaze…

“Why,
I am here,
now,
just this,
only me,
with you,
beloved,
terrible,
most venerable
One.”

I heard a light chuckle
Then
She laughed!
At once joyful
And full of
Mysterious meaning.

And more gently spoke,
“Of course you are
Little one.
Of course you are.”

So,
Slowly, cautiously
I ducked my head
Beneath the sill,
Onto my pillow
Where She couldn’t
See me or
Hold me
In her brilliance.

And drifted back
Into
Lunatic
Dreams.