Cues from birds and whales on how to live
A little more than a year before COVID-19 was declared a pandemic and I lost my job, I experienced a different kind of pull-the-rug-out feeling when a close friend’s boyfriend died unexpectedly at barely 35. My usual ability to keep a good attitude during hard times was difficult to sustain. My attention span, social grace, and care for day to day responsibilities saw themselves quietly out the door. Concerning myself with anything other than showing up for my grieving person and processing what had happened felt inappropriate in the context of such unfair loss. And having been protected from loss for so much of my life, I was shocked to discover that the “order of things” was actually a fragile, arbitrary story I had gladly spun. To borrow the words of Madeline Miller—carrying on with routine as if everything hadn’t changed felt as though I were “weaving my cloths by day and unraveling them at night, making nothing.”
A year and a few months later, as lockdown began and continued on, seemingly endless, I felt painfully aware of humankind’s impermanence all at once and all the time. Endless maps of disaster laid out our collective vulnerability to disease, made worse by climate catastrophe and structural violence. I could only watch the news with the subtitles on, no sound. Police and fire departments warn supplies for first responders running dangerously low. Should someone have to die so others can savor a steak? America's Black and Hispanic communities are bearing the brunt of the coronavirus crisis. Las Vegas homeless people are sleeping in a parking lot—six feet apart. Mississippi, Texas, and Ohio move to limit abortion as part of coronavirus response. The voices of the anchors were either unbearably emotional, attempting to hold it together despite the daily weight, or—more unnerving—monotonous and detached, unable to process the world’s grieving on such a huge scale. Like the year before, I couldn’t find meaning in the grief. I saw no silver linings, no “they’re in a better place,” no returning to how things were. Just an overwhelming sense of powerlessness.
I thought back to what had helped me then. Books were nice, I remembered, especially ones that were grim and honest, but also kind of sweet. I read memoirs by lovely, good-humored people dissecting their terrible childhoods. I read a novel about leading a solitary life on Mars after your crew accidentally leaves you for dead. And then another about escaping the reality of a terminal diagnosis to live alone in the woods. I devoured one after the other on my hour and a half commute to work (back when we were doing such things), making use of the precious minutes I felt I was wasting on endless cross-town buses. I wanted to be saturated with stories of surviving what I considered to be ‘worthy’ grief. I thought my own grief unworthy by my proximity to the person now gone. I wasn’t closest to him, by far. But still, frustratingly, what could only be grief persisted. It popped up in my life again and again like a ubiquitous whack-a-mole, even when colleagues or friends thought I’d be “over it by now.” I tried to understand why nothing was making me feel better and I looked anywhere for tips to make it “go away.” But there was no making sense of this. What’s the point of it all anyway? I thought. And it was this that brought me to the books about science. What better place to understand the rhythms of survival, living, and dying—all of which felt pretty random and unfair to me at that moment—than there?
Dolphins and whales, I decided, really had the whole existence thing figured out. They’ve been swimming along fine for millions of years—captivating us, captivated by us. They feature in our myths, our cults, and (unfortunately) our travel industry. In Susan Casey’s Voices of the Ocean, I learned about our fascination with these animals and their mysterious, mega-smart brains. At one point, she asks biopsychologist Lori Marino, “If dolphins had stayed on land, would they now be the dominant intelligence on Earth?” In other words, I translated in my head, given their complex brains and the millions of years of evolution they have on us, are they better than humans? The question made me stop, and I rolled it over and over again, desperate to learn from our watery friends how I could do this whole “living” thing better. Dr. Marino pauses and thinks a bit before answering. “While they don’t build rockets, [dolphins’] level of sociality is so sophisticated I don’t think they have anything to learn from us,” she says. “The fact that they have cohabitated the ocean and not destroyed themselves really speaks to the fact that they have figured out a way to do this in a way we haven’t.”
What makes survival so hard for humans? I found myself wondering as I read. Why do we drive ourselves nuts in search of our purpose, meanwhile destroying the planet as we try to figure it out? Cetaceans have been fine at this ‘harmony with the whole’ business for much longer than we’ve even been around. They “just keep swimming,” like Dory in Finding Nemo. Perhaps, though, there’s an answer in how Casey asks her question. The assumption that if dolphins were really more ‘advanced’ of a species, they would want to dominate us, is some pretty Western, expansionist thinking.
What if we didn’t ask questions like that at all? What if we believed that the highest form of intelligence, the deepest, most authentic sense of purpose, is contributing to a collective harmony?
In the 1970s, Westerners began processing some of their climate grief, built up since industrialization, through the Save the Whales movement. Those at the center of it ached for “an alternative world where the wounds inflicted by the destructive logic of present-day social relations between humans, technoscience, and nature are healed,” Margaret Grebowicz writes in Whale Song. Whales, in their deep blue mystery, offer a glimpse into “the true and sacred pleasures of a simple life in harmony with the natural environment and each other.” The efforts to save them were “a direct response to the unlivability of modern life.” Although we may perceive ourselves this world’s most dominant creature, there is something we can learn from the others after all. The saving of nature and the healing of self are not two separate goals, but intertwined and interdependent. Like Robin Wall Kimmerer writes in Braiding Sweetgrass, “As we work to heal the earth, the earth heals us.”
Restless during the first weeks of my local lockdown last March, I watched Blue Planet footage of blue whales, taken from above, following the slow movement of the largest creature to ever exist on our world as it traveled thousands of miles. I turned on the Monterey Bay Aquarium livestream of the bay outside their facility, hoping I’d see one. I wondered if whales felt what Romain Rolland called an “oceanic feeling” (a spiritual sense of limitlessness) as they traversed so vast a blue landscape. Do they feel awe? Or, is it uniquely human to gawk at how tiny we are in the face of all that is larger, infinite, and unknown?
When I wasn’t reading about whales, I read about sharks. I was mesmerized by their ability to follow the same migration along the ocean floor each year, down to the exact path, as if comfortably retracing footsteps left in the sand. As I watched these alien-like species following ancient rhythms, responding to instinct or magnetic fields or something else, I felt something like jealousy. I too must fit into some greater motion, automatically and through no actions of my own, I found myself thinking hopefully. If only I understood how.
“Perhaps meaning itself is an illusion,” Alan Lightman writes in Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine about humanity’s relentless existential anxiety and pursuit of answers. When I read this line it was still the Before Times. I was standing, balancing, on a crowded bus heading toward my office at 60mph. Attempting to hold the hardback with one hand and the bus’ metal bar with the other, squished in between bodies, I could get behind the more nihilistic interpretations of the statement. And now, one year into the pandemic, I can too. “After all,” he continued, “why should I insist on meaning? Fish and squirrels get by quite well without it.” Creatures like that lived in “The Now,” Lightman continued, where all they did was worry over the concerns of the moment rather than any future problems (like the ones I was about to have arriving sweaty and late to work).
What would it feel like if I could detach myself from the collective weight of the day and take each moment one at a time? Could I exist fully in The Now? Sounds peaceful. And it would save a lot of the energy I spent worrying about the pain, social transgressions, and anxiety attacks I was sure I would experience in the near future. It’s hard, though, for humans to live detached from the narratives—large and small—that we construct to understand, organize, and predict our lives. “We want to go beyond the moment,” Lightman continues. “We want to build systems and patterns and memories that connect moment to moment to eternity. We long to be part of the Infinite.”
With the sudden loss of a young friend in 2019, the loss of a foreseeable future in 2020, and the continuing loss now in 2021, I find myself with an ever-strengthened obsession with The Now. What else is there? I thought in March 2020 as the world got quiet. With loss upon loss unfolding, tomorrow wasn’t certain—there was only each slow, terrible moment. The Now seemed not just an appealing thought, but the only place. Might the fish and the squirrels share some tips for living here? There were plenty of them in my backyard I could ask. Squirrels that is, not fish. It’s lovely there, with trees, bushes, and birds. Each day, I told myself, I would leave my phone inside and sit on the porch in the stillness, resisting the urge to check what latest horrors were unfolding. That would help—letting myself escape the day’s obligations to be there in the quiet.
The first day, I realized it wasn’t quiet at all. Things were plenty busy in The Now. There were Eucalyptus branches creaking, little squirrel feet scratching up the tree bark, and unseen rodents scurrying through endless groves of ivy. Once, I heard human footsteps crunching the leaves behind me and turned in alarm only to see a tiny, bloated-looking bird hopping furiously back and forth in a determined, pulsating dance. Birds I guessed were blue jays let out terrorizing squawks above me at the others, part of a continual effort to expand territory from one tree to the next. Massive crows cawed menacingly from redwood perches, making it clear to me and anyone else who passed by who really owned the place. And then occasionally, I heard a cartoonish call I discovered came from a red tailed hawk. It was a noise I had only ever heard on television (the end of the Colbert Show title sequence, anyone?) and it embarrassed me to witness it in its natural nakedness. Ever since the humans had retreated indoors, The Now had become a lively place.
After a year of observing, I still find myself both entertained and soothed by the activity—every second so filled with audible movement that I can escape the noise in my head for a while. As I sit on my porch, I try to track down each source of sound with my eyes. None of the creatures seem to notice me, or else they don’t mind me watching them with my purple slippers and unwashed hair, a cup of coffee. I look to them for cues about what I should be doing in this orchestra. “The rain is changing from a major to a minor key, maybe letting up a little,” Barbara Kingsolver’s character observes about her beloved homeplace in Pigs in Heaven. And I begin to think of the wooded property I rent in the Oakland hills in this musical way. I track the busyness of the day and the changing social dynamics I perceive (accurately or not) between the players. It’s a hustle bustle of beings who know their purpose here. They understand their place in the puzzle of the universe, I think jealously. Or else they don’t think too much of it. The squirrels bury and forget their acorns according to a natural and ignorant rhythm. The birds compete for branches out of a primal, survivalist anxiety. A non-biologist like myself might be tempted to say there is no rhyme, no reason to their behavior at all other than, simply, this is the way it has always been. But perhaps—wouldn’t it be nice—they’re privy to the secret of it all and one day I’ll catch on too?
Beyond the movements of this world, on a much larger scale, seventeenth century astronomer Johannes Kepler hypothesized that there exists a harmony between the planets of our solar system. As each planet moves at a different speed, they sing to each other—do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti, do—ad infinitum. Our tiny ears can’t hear these cosmic vibrations, but they are harmonies all the same. Our Earth “forever humming,” writes Grebowicz. Reading this, I imagined my small and insignificant movements, like those of the birds in my yard or the sharks finding their way thousands of miles across the ocean floor, are nonetheless part of a grander whole.
Whether in pursuit of scientific knowledge, spiritual experience, or some other explanation for our being here and what we should do while we’re alive—it’s human to search for meaning. We organize our world and worlds beyond into narratives that might explain a piece of the puzzle. But I cannot explain loss. I cannot give a narrative to that. So, in the absence of meaning-making, I find comfort in the beautiful mysteries of life on our planet. I’ll forever keep reading about them: The warm waters of the south Pacific where humpbacks from disparate oceans trade their songs. The remote shark cafe in the Pacific where sharks perform mysterious nose dives that stump scientists. The bone rupturing force of a sperm whale’s click, felt from miles away. Dolphins’ ability to communicate holographically. Coral that spawn in collective unison under the full moon. An octopus that changes colors as it dreams. I rejoice in beings that seem to have it all figured out. I study their roadmaps in hopes I will understand where I fit. But mostly, I try not to let my obsession with my own human confusion distract me too much from the beautiful, strange music of it all.
Works Cited
Bryld, Mette and Nina Lykke. Cosmodolphins: Feminist Cultural Studies of Technology, Animals, and the Sacred (1999)
Casey, Susan. Voices in the Ocean (2015)
Grebowicz, Margaret. Whale Song (2017)
Kingsolver, Barbara. Pigs in Heaven (1993)
Miller, Madeline. Circe (2018)
Thumbnail includes image by kohane (CC BY 2.0)
