| The polar ice caps are melting. People all over the world are being murdered and dying of assorted diseases as you read this. There are more injustices than one can shake a stick at in a mere ten-block radius of any community within the larger community where unemployment, incarceration rates and other negative indicators of our "well-being" are off the charts. This is the case in Detroit, Los Angles, New York City, Gary, Milwaukee and little Madison. And I haven't even attempted to scratch the surface of the maladies that color all our lives even if we have tricked ourselves into believing that the person or neighborhood or race or economic circumstances or other defining characteristic of the person or group of people across the street or on the other side of the world really has nothing to do with us. Estuaries are bodies of water that are a blend of saltwater and freshwater -- the places where ocean water flows to lakes and rivers and lakes and rivers make their ways to the ocean. Estuaries are defined by the mixing and blending of environments. We have yet to come to the place where we understand and accept that our respective neighborhoods and by extension the states, country and world we all share is an estuary. No man-made barrier can separate one reality from another. Life on one side of any given street is not and cannot be considered separate from life on the opposite side of the street. But we behave as though these boundaries are actual. We are masters at self-deception. And if any of this holds a fraction of an ounce of possible truth, why would I devote this precious time and this hallowed space to talk about the disoriented mother whale and her offspring who are swimming and fighting for their lives in alien freshwater environments when saltwater is what sustains them? Is it because whales are mammals and this is one significant characteristic that they have in common with humans? I don't think so. Is it because their size makes them virtually impossible to ignore? Maybe. Or is our interest captured because we identify with other living, breathing things that are stressed to the point of breaking because they are valiantly surviving in alien environments that are hostile to their essence? Yes. I think this is the case. Recent news accounts talk about how the mother whale and her calf have spent more than one week in freshwater. How they have visible injuries in the form of large lacerations probably caused by encounters with boat motors. Caring human scientists and whale watchers have interpreted tail slapping as distress signals. The normally slick and shiny skin of the animals is now pitted and dull. Caring people are trying to figure out ways to encourage the whales to move quickly from their killing freshwater hospice to saltwater. The trick is to somehow impress upon the whales the urgency or returning to life sustaining salty environs without increasing their stress level too much. What does all this have to do with humans? Maybe everything. My best guess coupled with personal experience suggests that many or most of us spend inordinate amounts of time in environments that do not nurture the essential parts of ourselves. We compromise ourselves to the verge of the extinction of our "true" selves for the things that we have come to regard as necessities. We buy the perhaps faulty equation that earning a living is necessarily on the opposite side of the spectrum from the things that we truly enjoy -- the things that resonate with the deeper parts of ourselves. No. I'm not preaching or pretending to have figured it all out. I'm just making observations. Here are a couple of personal examples of how far I have, in the past, drifted away from who I really am. One day, a couple of years ago, I was driving to work. I had the car radio on. The usual drivel filled the airwaves and my mind. Then out of nowhere one of my favorite songs from the past imposed itself gently and gloriously on the present moment. Sure. I heard the song with my ears. But the more interesting part of the experience was that I felt the tune somewhere in my core in a way that I likely would not been able to explain to another human being. An even more compelling part of that moment was that it was genuinely mine and I did not feel the need or compulsion to attempt to explain it to anyone else. I carried the song with me from the garage to the office and held on to it for as long as I was able. It was a ripple of pure and unadulterated truth in the estuary of life. Words were not necessary to convey the significance of that moment. Confirmation was not required or desired. At that very instant, I asked myself the startling and troublesome question: How many days or weeks or months did I go without feeling that kind of connection? Another personal example: Sure. I laugh pretty routinely, but I got to the point where my laughter felt insincere even to me. Rather than emanating from somewhere deep inside my stomach, my laughter sounded like a bag of marbles emptied on a cold, tile floor. The scary thing was that I had grown accustomed to the shallow, clacking sound of false gaiety bouncing off of tiled floors and empty walls. Then one day I ran into an old friend a few giant steps from the entrance to the Dane County Public Safety Building. We had not seen each other for a long time. We talked about simple things, but these everyday affairs took on a new life. Before we knew it we were laughing uncontrollably and gripping our stomachs with the exquisite pain of being breathless from really laughing. We laughed until we cried. We laughed until our faces hurt. We laughed and begged each other to stop talking because every syllable that the other uttered threw us into another fit of laughter. When we parted, I asked myself how long I had gone without experiencing that kind of good-natured, wild abandon. I wonder how long any being can live outside of their element. I question how long a saltwater whale can survive in freshwater. I don't know if they will live or die, but by the time this issue of The Capital City Hues is printed, their fate will have been decided. I wish them well. I wish us well in our journey to filter out our essence from the mixed water of the estuary of life. |
| Simple Things/Lang Kenneth Haynes Whale of a bad time |
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