Sentinels of the salt waters

In the vast silent ocean, in the unimaginable blue black depths there are beings moving and turning. Ancient and wise, precious beyond words. Huge and still, made of mystery and the deep secrets of the earth. They weave their strange, aching wails of longing around our earth. They are guardians of the sea, sentinels of the salt waters. Have you any understanding of this wonder? can you meet yourself in the gentle, endless blackness that is the whales quiet eye? For thousands upon thousands of years they have been here, singing their tribal songs, shaping the waves with their great tails and fins, turning as the earth turns, resting in the vast intelligence of the prayer fields of mother Gaia. Swim with them for a moment, rising and falling, from the surface to the deep, from the darkness to the light. Rest in the gentle, heart-rending wonder of creation.

I am sorry. I am so sorry. Last week I saw you beached, robbed of your grace and your stillness, your belly full of plastic. Your death a slow and strange agony. Deafened by the new sounds that have filled the places where once there was only silence you could no longer hear the singing of your brothers and your sisters or intuit the pathways of the sea and you finished your days massive on the sand, humans like ants surrounding you, coming to stare at your great body.

I know not where we are going, we are unfolding and moving, changing and growing. The mandala is spiralling and opening across universes. Life moves, love moves and all must move with it, all must change. But where so ever we go, whatever we become, however humanity recreates itself, we will carry these deaths with us. Another bead on a dark necklace of grief. They were not hunted, they were not hated but they were killed nonetheless. By our noisy stupidity and magnificent foolishness, by arrogance and by blindness, by me and by you.

Feel no guilt, don’t let the blanket of shame fall about you. Know the grief. See the waste. And next time you sit down to pray, let your sincere fingers rise to the prayer beads that you wear about your neck. This dark necklace of our human folly. Find the beauty in the lines and the forms of the pearls strung there. Elephants and tigers are hanging there, eagles and rainforests, children and families. Let the grief and longing become your ocean as you move and turn like a great whale listening for the secrets of this life. Let the whale-song ache of your soul call for the one sea from which you came. Heart breaks at every prayer bead you touch and the water comes in, the love comes pouring in through the cracks, making you whole again and turning your eyes once again towards the rising sun and whatever may come. The beads are bright at your throat. Your voice is full of truth. God is at play within you.