When I Look Down, I Miss the Whales
I’ve been so sleepy today, trying to fight off the urge to take multiple naps. I’m okay, I think. I have a song called “I Miss the Whales” coming out on Friday, July 24th and I wrote it on a day I was feeling pretty sad, pretty alone. I remembered a breaching whale I’d seen the week before with one of my best friend’s who’d come to visit me in Bermuda.
Seeing, or experiencing the whale, felt like an epiphany of sorts, a strange synchronicity where many of the questions and doubts I was holding were answered in this unexpected encounter. Not everyone’s life changes after seeing a whale breach, and this song is not so much about whales breaching as it is the possibility that you might miss the things that change you, if you’re not paying attention, if you’re not open to being changed. In my case, the whale appeared when I wasn’t looking for it, I almost missed it.The fact that I didn’t miss it, inspired the sense that I ought to hold onto it and keep it as a guide to find more moments and things like it. How can I deepen my awareness of the things that call me, that ask for my attention?
It’s funny because at the moment, the song feels more like a riptide than a river. The “go with the flow” I call for in the song, tempts me with a nostalgia for the ease with which those words manifested in my life after I wrote it. How do you know what the “flow” is? The deep sense of knowing I carried when I wrote it, is a knowing that feels a little more distant right now. And it’s not to say I don’t believe in what I’m singing, but more that I believe so much in what I’m singing, and belief sometimes is hard in practice. I’m writing this now because these past months I’ve read many books/papers and met many people in a growing effort to connect dots about ecology and spirituality, mythology, and semiotics, and Bermuda, and my life, (and whales) and it all just feels very big. My uncertainty about what to do and where I’m going is also laden with lots of evidence to indicate that I am curious about many things- I am choosing to believe in my curiosity more than my doubt, though that’s also not so easy!
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I am also trying to step into the possibility that sharing these feelings publicly is not unnecessary and also not necessarily premature. That I don’t have to speak to everything all at once. That I can tell you my aim without having fulfilled it. If there’s one thing this path has taught me, it’s that. It’s kinda my whole “in medias res” thing. I guess I’m so afraid to speak sometimes because it feels like I don’t know enough.
This curiosity sometimes makes it hard to start, to communicate what I’m trying to get closer to. My aim, is to not miss the whales, to find ways to better receive the things that help remind me that I am alive, to contemplate what being “alive” even is. My aim is to write about these moments, to ask you about yours, to discover how my feeling of aliveness is connected to the aliveness of other beings. My aim is to notice, to action that noticing into more life, love.
