The Dolphin I Used To Be…

“As I gazed at the ocean, I had a sense that this creature was me — the quicksilver form that crested the waves as if friction was nothing more than an abstract concept —  from a time before the Earth got old and the land grew tired of watching the sea as it slowly died.”

The Earth is really two planets, one laid over the other like a geological palimpsest; there are continents, the familiar land masses, but mostly there is water. Enough to cover seven tenths of the surface. So “Planet Ocean” rather than “Planet Earth.” We don’t tend to notice this as much as perhaps we should, maybe because we have lungs rather than gills, but even so we should think of the sea more than we do.  Be mindful of its presence in our daily lives: of the food it provides, of the weather systems it drives, of the carbon it captures.

Somewhere in our brainstem we remember; and maybe something is triggered in our subconscious when we see a dolphin leap from the water, spinning about its curved axis; something to do with kinship and allegiance; something which says: that was us once, and may yet be again, when — perhaps in desperation, when the food and the clean water runs out, or when the over-heated furnace becomes too hot —  we give up on the land and go back to the sea.  As we were always destined to do.