Poet and author Alexis Pauline Gumbs reflects on what we can learn about a practice of presence through the study of dolphins for whom proclaiming presence is a life-saving operation:
What could it mean to be present with each other across time and space and difference? Presence is interpersonal and interspecies and intergalactic, in some ways eternal. How can we rethink our presence on the planet and its precarity by paying attention to how the Indus dolphins have brought themselves back from the brink of extinction?… Marine mammal mentorship offers us the chance for presence as celebration, as survival and its excess, as more than we even know how to love about ourselves and each other….
The Indus and Ganges river dolphins live in sound. They make sound constantly, echolocating day and night. In a quickly moving environment they ask where, again where, again where. The poem of the Indus river dolphin is the ongoing sound of here, a sonic consciousness of what surrounds them, a form of reflective presence. Here.
The home of the Indus river dolphin has gone through many manmade changes. First of all, pollution. First of all, illegal poverty-induced fishing methods. First of all, before that, a legend about a sea monster, and more recently, in the 1980s, a takeover of the river banks of Sindh by the Daku Raj, a group of organized gangs who effectively scared all the fisherfolk away. Through all of it, the Indus river dolphin, who clicks all day and night, has been saying, here. Here. Here. Here. In a language I want to learn. According to the scientists who have been counting the endangered Indus river dolphin population since 1972, their population has steadily increased every year. From 132 when they first started counting to 1,419 this year. Here. Here. Here.
Gumbs invites us to consider how we might offer our presence:
In the language I was raised in, “here” means “this place where we are,” and it also means “here” as in “I give this to you.” Could I learn from the Indus river dolphin a language of continuous presence and offering? A language that brings a species back from the brink, a life-giving language? Could I learn that? Could we learn that? We who click a different way, on linked computers day and night?
What I want to say to you requires a more nuanced field of receptive language than I have ever spoken. It requires me to reshape my forehead, my lungs. It requires me to redistribute my dependence on visual information. So I will close my eyes and say it: Here. Here I am. Here I am with you. Here is all of me. And here we are. Here. Inside this blinding presence. Here. A constant call in a moving world. Here. All of it. Here. Here. Humbly listening towards home. And here. And here. Right here. My poem for you. My offered presence. This turbid life. Yes. Here you go.
Reference:
Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals (AK Press, 2020), 67–69.
Image credit and inspiration: Bruce Tang, untitled (detail), 2019, photo, Japan, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. Attentive to the moment and the task at hand, we find that holiness lives in simple, ordinary rhythms—no grand cathedral required, only the quiet altar of a kitchen table.
Story from Our Community:
Brother Lawrence has crossed my path several times. I was first introduced to his life on a retreat many years ago. Since that time, his name has popped up now and then, reminding me that every action I take and all that I do is embedded in the presence of God. I don’t have to bother about seeing the effects or results. At present it’s taking care of my beloved wife in her disease. Sharing her pain and distress brings me back to this Presence. We are not alone.
—Roland W.
