Whales. You never stop delighting me, with your sporadic breaches and loud thumps. With your spray. With your heft and your grace. What a contradiction.

It sometimes feels like you’re teasing me, when I see the aftermath of a breach and then keep a watchful eye, only to see an occasional dorsal fin. But I know you are not here to entertain me, but yourself. And I am grateful for any chance to witness you.

I am grateful that you exist - that we humans stopped harvesting you and allowed you to flourish. But I am concerned about what we are doing to your ocean. This winter has been unsettlingly warm. Some people are grateful for the mild winters, but I worry about more-than-human lives that respond more acutely to temperature. What will you make of these changes? I hope you can cope, adapt, respond. It seems like our only option at this point.

Another juxtoposition (and look, another pair of whales!) -the peace and tranquility of this headland against the environmental destruction we insist upon.

You are our success story, dear Humpback Whale. But of course we stopped hunting you, in part, because we could do without your oil. We found fossil fuels. From devastating your lifeworlds, to devastating all.

Just as I breathe out here, you blow. So perfectly timed. And a reminder that we share the same oxygen. That you rely on our forests as much as I do.

Save the forests. Save the whales.

For we are, of course, all interconnected. We all need one another. And I need you whale. For hope. For beauty. For delight.

The smile that arrives on my face each time you rise to breathe is involuntary. What is our historical relationship that makes me so fond of you? Is it that we both come from the same ocean? That we are kin? That your delight is my delight? That your calm and graceful movement through the world could be my calm and graceful movement through the world?

A letter to you, whales

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