I’m so glad you’re here

Floating in the electric blue open ocean, deep in the South Pacific, I fixed my eyes on black and white fluke of the Singer. With his head pointed down to the ocean floor, his voice entered everywhere inside my body as a seismic, visceral, mammalian tremor. I felt my chest exploding open to the radical eccentricity of this throbbing cetacean melody. I let my body relax, suspending my awareness of being in the realm of hammerhead, bull, and tiger sharks, and fearlessly listened with my whole being. I let his strange voice penetrate my own mammalian core without trying to categorize any single sound, or anthropomorphize the meaning of his song. His fluke moved slightly in the current, about 80 feet down through a constellation of jellies, as the gentle rolling swells lifted my body in slow back rhythm of this rapture. The range of his voice moved me – long, deep guttural moans rose into soaring trills and percussive squeaks. Ten minutes became twenty. In the stillness of this listening, I felt my whole body light up to receive this gift. I tried to send my gratitude to his giant heart. I didn’t know if he was aware of having an audience, or knew what it meant to one human’s heart to hear him simply singing his song. Here was a male creature, uninhibited, letting his voice carry freely miles wide and deep into the ocean. We may never be able to truly translate the meaning of a male humpback’s song, but anyone who has ever been able to listen cannot deny the nature of this expression – from the heart. When he was ready for a breath, he let the hulk of his graceful body rise up from the sandy bottom. With just one stroke of his giant pectoral fins, he exhaled at the surface to fill his lungs for the next song.

I can still feel the vibration of the Singer in every cell of my body. What he gave me was the gift of deep presence to every creature’s unique song. I find myself falling into the same blissful rapture when I give the same pure ear to the crickets, the meadowlarks, the woodpeckers, the tree frogs… It’s never too late to learn how to listen. It’s one of my favorite ways of saying “I’m so glad you’re here.”