Last week, I saw a video on PBS, on the program Nature. It is also on YouTube and is named Befriending a Sperm Whale.
We enter the story of Patrick Dykstra, a videographer, and a female sperm whale. We see them hanging vertically, face to face, in deep water. Patrick has named this sperm whale “Dolores” and trailed her for years. He speaks of his love for her. We can imagine what they feel, and perhaps we feel with them.
There is footage in the film of large groups of sperm whales touching while looking warmly into each other’s faces. To me, this feels rather like affectionate hugging. We also see film footage of paintings depicting the slaughter of sperm whales during the nineteenth century. The brothers and sisters of the sperm whales being slaughtered have gathered around the bloody scene, making it worse for them all. It seems as if they are in solidarity with each other, even to their deaths.
I remember TV footage in the 1960s and seventies of young white people being beaten while sitting at lunch counters with their black brothers and sisters in the southern U.S. during the Civil Rights Movement.
What is it that changes what we dare hope for?
The picture book story of a pig named Wilbur and a spider named Charlotte, Charlotte’s Web, changed the menus and the minds of many children forever.
As for me, my interest in whales bubbles up again within me. Whale-watching, open boats full of people eager to catch glimpses of whales, pass through the waters of the Salish Sea outside my study window.
Years ago, I was seriously taken with the novel Moby-Dick, the tale of an old ship’s captain, a whaler named Ahab, who madly pursued, for years, Moby Dick, an old male sperm whale turned white with age.
Years before where the novel Moby-Dick begins, the old man’s leg was taken by this whale and replaced by a wooden stump. Captain Ahab’s vengeful goal to kill Moby Dick was framed by his rage. We learn that this whale has been attacking whaling boats with a kind of vengeful rage like Ahab’s. The desire for the death of each other seems outsized.
The first mate on board, a man not young and not old, named Starbuck, chose a course of inaction—not to kill Ahab. Starbuck was a Christian who thought that killing is not Christ’s way; so, even though he saw the whale’s murderous intent toward the ship’s crew and their captain, Starbuck did nothing. Then, the story tells that the vengeful old whale, Moby Dick, dragged all the people on board down to their watery grave.
There have been many stories written to change our minds and hearts and open our consciousness. We know true stories from history that resonate in many ways with the story of Moby-Dick.
The continuing history of how this story turns out for us will somehow come up from the deep and change what will happen in our consciousness and in our world. I dare to hope.
What are you reading, rereading, or watching this season? What comes to mind when you read stories these days? For me, these cooler months set the scene for changes in hearts and minds.
An Anna’s hummingbird with a gloriously ruby head hovered just now for a moment outside my window—then flew on by.
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