Second Story

It's been a struggle lately, and I'm fried. How about you? Pandemic, politics, and, now, smoke. A week indoors without opening windows, the lurid red-gray soup blanketing everything, followed by ash, reminding us that its burden of melted toxins is a heavy one: lead-based paint, plastic, batteries, rubber, varnish, flesh.

I've been in a torpor of despair, a mood that asks for nothing, as in, Nothing is what it asks for. Nothing makes sense. Nothing matters. Nothing comes to mind to stop the runaway train of lies and confusion carrying us downstream in its torrent of calamities. Sleep calls but refuses to stay. Inspiration is scarce. Usually, exercise helps. And a good salad. Ice cream. Buttered toast. But each morsel is a reminder of the too-many hungry, the too-many suffering, the too-many lost, including the too-many years we didn't realize how much dying was going on in the natural world, and how much harm was lurking in the compromises we accepted.

The question doesn't change: What can we do in the face of such unimaginable dismantling? I've asked this before. I can't stop asking it. What is the response that is more than voting, protesting, bearing witness - more than sanctuary?

The old admonition still holds some luster: Go into the mountains and make art for five hundred years. The way I understand this is that sometimes we have to step away in order to engage more deeply. Sometimes the only choice is to find spaciousness in confinement, and to make beauty in response to brutality. In the I Ching, the hexagram called Confining Oppression says, "... this oppression teaches you about the power to find what is Great and rely on it... Use Confining to separate your own power to realize the Way from the collective values that are oppressing you."

For me, the equivalent of going into the mountains is to stay here, by the sea, and invite the words to come that will remake the world by juxtaposing image and insight in ways that make sense to me... a small island or maybe just a stepping stone to stand on, and to offer the results as a prayer. In the process, I become a version of myself who knows how to not-allow all the endless vexations and cruelties that have become the norm I did not agree to.

If it's true that stories need companions, then what is the second story blossoming alongside this story we are in of destruction and despair? Oddly, at the moment, it's the bowhead whale. I've been doing some research for a book, and I have fallen in love with bowhead whales. Bowheads spend their lives in the Arctic, under and around the ice in the Bering, Chukchi and Beaufort Seas. They grow to be sixty feet long and weigh sixty tons and can break through two-foot-thick ice with their heads. They sing. They live for two hundred years. And, in the time before, in what is now called Barrow, Alaska, the bowheads gave themselves to Iñupiat hunters through an elaborate ritual relationship that translated into actual whales. Specifically, the whales chose to come to the hunters who gave most generously to the less fortunate and to the community. The whales swam alongside the walrus-skin hunting skiffs, rolled on their sides and gazed into the eyes of their chosen hunter, calmly awaiting the harpoon. The men dressed carefully, waited silently. The captain's wife entered into solitary, silent ritual, emerging only when the whale had been brought ashore and shared. Then she brought a cup of fresh water from a special spring and poured it on the whale's head before it was released back into the sea, in order to thank it and to feed the souls of future whales so they would continue to sustain the people.

In the late 1800's and early 1900's, commercial whaling decimated bowheads and other whales almost to extinction in order to provide baleen for corsets and parasols, oil for lamps and looms, and grease to coat the feet of soldiers in the trenches during World War I, to keep their feet from rotting in the mud. Industrialized whaling meant indiscriminate slaughter and horrendous waste: once the whale's blubber had been rendered into oil in the sloshing cauldrons on deck, the meat, bones and skin were simply discarded. In the face of such disrespect, the whales' behavior changed: instead of coming to the boats, they fled deeper into the ice. After the whales were gone, the newcomers hunted walruses, seals, foxes, reindeer, and caribou, depleting them all. Missionaries came, along with mining, alcohol and politicians.

Eventually, crude oil replaced whale fat, hunting was restricted, and in recent decades bowhead populations have begun to recover. But entire landscapes were destroyed, and without the whales, the oceans are no longer themselves. Whales are architects of ocean health. Their plumes of urine and feces feed massive colonies of microbial life that, in turn, feeds fish, kelp forests and birds; their swimming circulates these nutrients; their dead bodies sink to the ocean floor and feed yet more life as they decompose. It is estimated that even in their diminished state, today's whale populations transfer 190,000 tons of carbon from the atmosphere to deep water, or the equivalent of 33 tons per whale per year. Whales affect nutrient balance and circulation that sustain kelp forests, shore birds and humans.

Author Bathsheba Demuth (Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait), says, "... if history has a soul to pass on, it comes from the habits of mind learned amid northern seasons. First among them is to see the lives of other species and their habitats as worthy of our moral imagination and as inseparable constituents of our social worlds. To do so requires attention: to pay mind to the small scale - the sudden quiet before the bear breaks through the willow - as much as to the large events, the season of wildfire or the turn in policy..."

What, then, is the redemptive story in the pairing of singing whales and smoke-choked pandemics? Or community-minded men and women engaged in deep ritual that feeds the unseen world, paired with feckless leaders who do everything for themselves and nothing for their people - or for the natural world that feeds everything? Perhaps, it is this: to keep the lone story of despair from falling over, we can set it next to a story so specific that it can rub shoulders with all that destruction and remain intact. One of the choices we have at this time is to set ourselves firmly along a continuum at least as long as the natural life of a bowhead whale. From that place, we can turn our attention to tending certain relationships in our own lives - the ones made of mystery and unexpected gifts.