Shark Tutorial
“Love means you breathe in two countries.”
It is rare for humans to witness apex predators facing off against each other. Recent dramatic footage off the coast of South Africa showed a group of orcas hunting great white sharks. The orcas had a specific advantage: like dolphins and wild dogs, they are highly social and work together when they hunt. As the orcas surround the sharks, the sharks try to protect themselves by making tight, slow turns as they stay close to the orcas instead of trying to flee. Being social. Working together. Responding to fear by staying close. Interesting lessons for a connected world at a disconnected time.
Of course, humans are social animals, too, though we seem to have forgotten that personal benefit means mutual benefit that benefits Earth. It is a sixth sense - or maybe a seventh, that hones our behavior to always align with the good of the Whole. This loss is at the heart of our unraveling. How do we rediscover and reclaim it?
I search body memory for encounters that reveal instinctive alignment and a sense of shared experience with the beyond-human world: the thrill of communion with elephants and birds; synchronicities and sudden appearances that shimmer with unmistakable traces of alignment, and the relief that comes when the thinking mind recedes and shared mind takes over. This must be an innate human capacity, hard-wired within us for the survival of all life. Surely we can rekindle it.
In 2015, I went to Isla Mujeres, Mexico, with a small group of friends hoping to swim with whale sharks. For three days before and after the full moon in July, these gentle giants gather there to feed on bonito eggs. They open their wide mouths and gulp them down. Though whale sharks are normally solitary beings, during these feeding events, they aggregate in the hundreds. In order to meet them, one must go to the open ocean, an hour or two from shore.
Whale sharks are as graceful and gentle as they are huge: males grow to be about 30 feet long, females nearly 50. Some individuals reach a length of more than 70 feet. Their lifespan parallels and exceeds that of humans: they live between 80 and 120 years.
The whale shark sanctuary requires humans to be circumspect: we are allowed to swim in twos and threes, with a guide, for brief stints in the water before returning to the boat and waiting for a time before being allowed to slip back in for another visit.
Before entering the water, we made offerings and humbly requested connection. There were hundreds and hundreds of whale sharks, as far as we could see. In the water, we did our best to avoid bumping into them. We didn’t want to scrape them with our fins. Yet, it was the sharks who protected us: with a flick of their massive tails they could easily have killed us. Instead, they came within a few inches and arced gracefully away. Once, I felt a thick, rigid dorsal fin brush lightly against me as a rising shark swept past.
The sharks seemed to enjoy playing with us. Our guide showed us how to turn on our sides for maximum speed as we kicked. The sharks came within a few feet; they made eye contact as we sped through the water, parallel to each other, sharing a horizontal swath of moving water. Our eyes locked and we briefly merged, carried by their slipstream. They engaged, we paralleled, they pulled away and circled back to connect again. It was beyond anything I had ever experienced, and it changed me. When I relive that sensation of active connection, I long to enter and stay in it. How can we cultivate or perhaps simply make ourselves available to that state of engagement where we pour together in active alignment?
I think of my friend’s daughter, Sophie, when she little. One day, she came home from school and announced that a particular girl was her best friend. Her mother had never heard of this child, had never seen her, so she asked, “Does this girl know that you two are best friends?” Sophie shrugged and replied, “No, but that’s her problem.” She could love her friend as a bestie whether or not the friend participated or was even aware of Sophie’s devotion. Maybe that’s how it is out there, and inside, too. Maybe those strangers are our best friends, and we don’t even know it.
