on whales and wolves and changing.

from the archives

Wolves, Whales and Viruses.

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<><> from the archives sometime smack in the middle of the pandemic<><>


2021.

I am writing about whales because my friend, a writer, a mother, sent me an article link:

Dead Whale, Reportedly 'One of the Largest' Ever Discovered, Found Off the Coast of Italy.

Maybe I’m not actually writing about whales.

Maybe I am writing about grief.

Or I am writing about motherhood.

Or I am writing about how to live while we are all dying.

Or I am writing about the uncovering, the daily big and small apocalypses.

Or I am writing about my grandmother.

Or I am writing about how shapeshifting / trans-species practices are ancestral.

Or I am writing about evolution.

Or maybe none of those things. 

​

Maybe I am writing about nothing at all.

…

I read that article about the dead whale, the one my friend sent.

this is an actual photo of the dead mother whale.

​

The whale was a mother. 

And according to the coast guard, one of the biggest of its species they have ever seen. She was found in the port waters under the city of Sorento, Italy. I cried reading during and after reading the article. I let that disdainful dark acid taste in my mouth travel my body and feel the debt of it all. The weight. The grief. The heaviness of what it means to be human and watch the sea die in front of your own eyes, in your grandmother's waters.

I went into the kitchen, where my daughters were hanging out and making food together. Don’t let me paint a picture that it’s all cute and nice. They are wild, feral, fierce beings that make serious messes and curse inappropriately.

A really big whale died in the Mediterranean. It was a mama. It’s the biggest one they ever found, I told them.

One daughter, in love with finding out all the facts, grabs her phone with the one hand not stirring whatever it was she was brewing on the stove and searches for the info.

Humans were notified of the dead whale by its loudly crying calf, she read to me from her screen. I already knew this information but didn’t act like I knew it so she would continue.

The calf had been throwing its body against the rock wall of the port, wailing loudly as if trying to get the attention of someone, trying to alert them of it’s dead mother, she read.

It may have been to alert the humans. Or maybe the wailing and crying and throwing its body against the wall was because of the electrifying and heavy loss and grief it was experiencing, knowing that its mother was dead.

 Looking at its dead mother; swollen, wrinkled in salt water. Looking at its dead mother and realizing she was now a child of the sea, all alone.

By the time human’s noticed the sounds of this whale calf, and got there, the calf slowed down throwing her body against the cliff walls, and quieted her wails. 

She was seen swimming away. She disappeared into the placid Mediterranean.

Another daughter of mine, who allows emotions to tsunami through her like a tropical storm, puts her earbuds in and I can see tears in her eyes. She grabs a broom and sweeps the floor because cleaning regulates her. Or allows her to escape her feelings. Distracts. Or maybe feels more. I don’t know because I am not in her body. But I know how soft and porous her body is. Maybe I have been too truthful about the world to her. Maybe I have said too much over the years. She was my firstborn. I felt fierce and honest and so naive when she came out. Like I would be so different. I would not keep secrets from my child, like I was raised, a house of heavy secrets. 

I felt it was only right to explain to her the reality about the world around her. I did not candy coat it or protect her. Maybe that’s wrong. I think it might be. I just didn’t want her to live in illusion. 

For fucks sake: Whales were dying. 

Someday, I told her a few years ago, you may need masks because the air will be too hard to breathe. I write this and the law is we all need to wear masks when we leave the house because of a virus and also because the smoke is so thick in the air from wildfires.

Aren’t we supposed to prepare them for all this? 

My last daughter, the little one who's not so little anymore, and who feels everything is just too much, and even the stuff that really isn’t too much feels like way too much for her. Sho seems to be the one always throwing her body against walls and wailing and howling about the world she was born into. She threw her body against my inner walls in a way where during her labor all I could do is wail. And she came out wailing and throwing things at walls. 

She is the one who thrashes and fights and puts on some good masks (not the COVID protection kind) to hide how she really feels. The one whose brain is magical in a non-magical world. She senses it all, all of it, without ever needing my words. And it takes such a toll on her body, how she feels and knows. 

She asks me, what kind of whale?

A Finback, I tell her.

She put her phone down, which is always in her hand. She put it down just barely, as it’s become an appendage since the pandemic. Her connection to a world outside our home. Her connection to everyone and everything. I try to make her go outside. She mostly stays in her room. I have not tried to take that only connection away, even though I know it’s not all good, it’s also not all bad. They need something. 

Did you know whales used to be wolves? She asks me. 

And before I could answer, and as soon as she says her last word, she picks the phone up again and continues to scroll through tic-tok, leaving blips and bites of constant sound transitions that make me feel like my head is going to spin off.

Dad told me whales were wolves and wolves were whales. I guess they can tell by their teeth. She explains to me while looking into her phone, sounds jumping out from it but changing every 3 seconds to new sounds. Blip. Blap. Bloop. Repeat.

 I wonder how her brain can be doing all the things at once; talking, thinking, remembering, looking, cooking, hearing, sensing, processing. How this world for her has been so different from her sisters. She was born in the crash of 2008, took her first steps the day of the Fukushima disaster, and went from a little girl to a teen during a pandemic. She’s also had a digital device available to her since before she had teeth. 

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Apparently, the evolutionary story goes that some kind of sharp toothed amphibians crawled out from the ocean at one point, for whatever reasons evolution calls to them. They left the sea. And claimed land as their new home. This creature eventually grew fur and turned into a mammal.

I recently found out, though some scientific article, that a virus that plagued the land like a tribillion years ago, turned creatures into full blown mammals. 

What happened was (forgive me if I am fucking science right on up here) was this or something like this: 

This particular virus from like a trillion years ago, which contains genetic information, infected the egg laying creatures and turned their egg gestation vessel (it’s possibly that the egg was probably carried inside the mother’s belly at that point in evolution- and not outside) and somehow the genetic info of the virus created a soft tissue organ in replacement of the egg, which eventually became placentas. 

So this particular virus gave us placentas. 

And this particular virus evolved us from end-stage amphibian-hood to beginning stage mammals. 

In this evolutionary time period (we are talking millions of years) - sea creatures became land creatures and egg layers became creatures who formed organs made of ancestral blood to nurture their unborn. That’s a big evolution. And it may or may not have anything to do with what I am going to say next, but I am going to say it anyway. I am a dreamer, not a theorist. But can dreams be theories?

These new land creatures (the ones that came from the water, slowly shed their amphibian scales and evolved into an ancient wolf-like dog-like ancestor. 

This creature that crawled out of the sea had eventually become a fully blown mammal, with fur, paws, placentas, and mammary glands filled with milk. ​ I do not know how long they were in this evolutionary state, or process. But at least a million and a few years. But. Here is the thing:

 Evolution, that clever beast, radically struck… again. 

These wolf-like ancestral creatures decided they were done with being on the land and ocean life was calling them back— we all know how the siren song is so strong of a pull. Or maybe that’s not it at all. Maybe they left land and went back into the water because land-life could not hold them for who they were, who they needed to be, anymore. 

Maybe they left the water in the first place because they knew land was the only way they would experience the evolution they needed, to return to the sea, differently. 

Did they leave land because they wanted to survive and could only find protection in the waters? Or did they leave land just because they wanted to? Evolution is a tricky, clever, intense process. Things happen and we have to change. Not sure we get a conscious choice in the matter. I keep thinking about a virus, which somehow over a period of time, gave us a placenta. And as someone whose roots are in midwifery, we know how miraculous and magical a placenta is. The placenta somehow keeps the body from rejecting the DNA that is not the mothers (the father’s is a foreign body) and it also serves the child with dense nutrient rich energy the entire 9 months.

And I think about how we are literally at war with a virus right now. And I wonder, how is this virus trying to change us? 

What is the purpose of its genetic code? And even if its purpose is just to survive, what does that mean for us, beyond the horrible fatality? As in, what else is it doing for us? I will ask that question a million times in my head every day. And then realize not everything is here for us. 

So here is what happened with the land creature that went back to sea. It became a whale.

A whale. SO: A sea creature becomes a four-legged land creature, a virus comes in there, evolves us to placenta style mammal then becomes a wolf-like creature. And goes back into the water, as a mammal. The beautiful, majestic, glorious Whale.

Whales remind me of dogs, my youngest daughter says. Don’t they look like doggies from the sea?

I heard dogs barking from her phone. Her favorite feeds are of animals; Maybe her head in the phone is all part of what’s next for her, for us. Maybe she’s evolving and changing and learning to become different, in a different kind of world, like the wolf-whale had to. Maybe this strange digital device. This strange unforgiving virus. This strange daily apocalypse where we have to slowly let go to allow things to be revealed, is truly a new evolution. 

They totally look like sea dogs. I said. Both are so beautiful. Loyal. Protective. Adaptable. They both love their families so much.

My daughter stopped listening to me, at least I thought she did. Head back to the phone fully. But then at the same time we both looked at one of our dogs who was lying on the floor in front of the fire. She had just made a squeaking noise to get our attention. We both went to her, squatted down, and gave her some rubs. And then we both laid down next to her. We both pressed against her body on either side. We spend a lot of hours of our day like this. 

Prince is getting so jealous, my daughter said.

Prince is our other dog, who happens to look remarkably similar to an orca whale and a wolf. When he was thinner and younger, and ran fast, he looked like he was swimming through the air. Prince was standing in the doorway looking at us all on the floor, his mouth hanging open and his tongue hanging out, panting and drooling and wondering why he was not getting this kind of attention. We called him over. He laid down on the other side of her. She pulled him close. All four of us pressed into the other. Dog, human, dog, human. Not sure of where we stopped and the other began. Not sure if there is even a stopping point, at least one that we didn’t make up somewhere along the way. ​Maybe we can all press a little harder into becoming each other. Maybe we can all become something else, together. 

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I don’t know who I related to more: the mother whale found dead in the port waters, life stolen too soon, unable to care for her child. Swollen, gone, and wondering if anyone really cares about how or why she died. Or the calf; its cry and wailing, throwing its body over and over again, against the wall that separates the ocean from the city of Sorrento, Italy. 

 It’s skin scratched and ragged from the sharp rocks, bloodied and raw, torn apart. It wonders if anyone is even listening, hearing it cry, wonders if anyone cares. Wonders who will witness their grief. Or wondering, can anyone hear their cry for help? Can someone save their mother?

And then my relation goes back to the mother whale, listless, still, done. A mother knowing nothing she could do could save the future. She just had to die, and trust that the ocean will hold her little one for her. Trust that their extended pod will care for her young. Trust that the calf would carry on her ways, would become a keeper of their stories. There is no difference between the two, the calf and the mother. They are the same. 

Somewhere when we choose to risk our lives to take care of another, we become each other. Somewhere when we choose to unconditionally love and be together, we lose the self in the other. I am both these creatures. The dying mother. And the wailing baby. Dead and crying and swollen and lost at sea. Trying to get the attention of change. Trying to remember how to change. ​​After my kid told me the evolutionary tale about how whales were wolves, my mind started obsessing about how things change. Or who we all used to be. Or who we all are becoming. And how long it will take. And how much suffering, grief, and death we will need to endure first. The wolf, so close to extinction, is our wild, nocturnal and dark way of being. They are out walking in the dark forest. They are guided by the moon. They give us permission to be alone and in the pack. I think about the watery home of the whale, that same water that is lover to the moon that the wolf is so famously connected to, and how it pushes and pulls the tides of where the whale lives. Or is it the water that waxes and wanes the moon? I think about this as a circle. Where does one begin and the other end. Where does one die and birth begins? All of everything between the water, the land, the moon, the wolf, the whale, us, everything is attached. 

This is the actual literal role of the placenta, in the mother, attached to the baby. The placenta actually contains everything that there is, taken in by the mother, in minute particles, it’s made of existence and passed through to what and who is to be born. ​It makes us part of the other. 

​If something changes, we all change. ​So much is changing.

How hard was that evolutionary process? How much pain did the sea creature go through to become a wolf? How much skin shedding and deep changing and letting go had to happen? And how much suffering or dying happened when the wolf walked back into the sea, to become a whale? And how awful was the virus that struck the land when it helped the hard crunchy egg become a soft, nourishing placenta? 

We tend to think of these as smooth transitions. We just see drawings in science books of one thing becoming the next. We read the science of it. How it happened. Maybe even why, when. But, what did it feel like? How uncomfortable did life have to get in order to shift into its next evolution? What did we go through, emotionally, physically, spiritually? We tend not to think of the transition, the process— just the end result. But that million years that happens between one thing becoming another, which ends so miraculously and awes us to our core— that million years, what did it all feel like in the transition?

What if it was really troubled times of whatever kind that initiated the movement from the sea creature to the land wolf back to the sea again as a whale? What if it was a virus. Or a messenger, of any kind. Nature’s howl, the soil’s wail, the water throwing herself against rocks, saying: we all must change. Or maybe it was always imprinted, from the beginning, genetically imprinted, to become a land creature that was always going to end up being a whale.  But it’s gonna take a minute or a million years. Hold on tight. ​ And that, that information, sent the animal back to sea, to become a whale. And also, what kind of trust in mystery do you have to have to decide to go from a land creature to a sea creature? How much surrender to mystery must we soften into to believe that we can become something new? 

The whale, as native american medicine shares, is the keeper of the records. It holds all the information, all the stories, of all things, from all the times. I keep thinking of the photo I saw of the whale in that article. She was so swollen in the water. Twice her size. So swollen with all the stories she carried. Where are they now? Who will keep them? 

Who will keep ours? As we surrender into this mysterious change? And die some intense deaths along with it. A little south down the coastline of where the whale was found was where my great grandparents lived. 

This particular slice of the coastline is my father’s mother’s ancestral land. These people, my ancestors, were once known as the ancient Lucanian people. The ancient Lucanian people were known as wolf-men and she-wolf. As warriors, it was said they became wolves. They shapeshifted when they needed to fight. ​They followed the wolves into the hills and learned how to become them, mimicked them, lived with them, and learned to transform into them, encoded or awakened their DNA to this wolf-like state. 

Who they were as people of the land were entirely entangled with this creature the wolf. 

They were not separated from the wolf, they became the wolf and the wolf in turn, probably became a part of them. There was no boundary. Everything was ensouled together. To be separate from each other, mineral, animal, human, planet... made no sense. In this place of ensoulment, in this way of living, what does an apocalypse even matter, or mean? In this place, when one thing can become the next, when wolf can become whale, and man can become wolf, and the sun can become us, and the soil is our skin -- what does it mean? 

We are entangled, entirely, intricately, and what if we knew it, actually understood it, practiced it— then what does it matter if the world is ending and we are all dying? Doesn’t that just mean we are radically changing with it/them? ​ Can’t we just become wolves? Or whales? Or what?…These are the things I am writing about, elsewhere, on a google doc. A doc that glares at my face, and taunts me, makes fun of me, telling me all these things cannot fit together. That science cannot become prose. That all these things cannot be connected, because we do not, at the most basic level, understand that everything is connected.

I am reaching way too far. That I am imagining beyond science. That I am just a writer trying to make sense of things that can only be sensed, not proven, maybe not even written, but only felt. Only kept in the belly as a story. Swollen with story. 

I remember when all three daughters asked me about death. The oldest was 2 or 3 and on the toilet, swinging her chubby legs with one of those cardbook books in her hand that had no words. 

She asked me “What does dead mean? and I told her when we are not here anymore in this body anymore. And she then stated, “And then we become butterflies” 

The middle daughter, she was about 3 as well when she asked me. She said to me, out of the blue while picnicking in the park, "before I died I was Ghandi" (I shit you not, she had a Gandhi t-shirt at home, just to be fair). 

Oh really? I asked her.

 "And before that I was an orca whale", she said. And then she said, "but when I die when I grown-up, I am just going back to source." (again, I shit just you not). 

And my youngest, at about the same age as the others, said to me “We really pick when we die and we can become whatever we want and I am going to be everything, even ice cream and also the ocean.”

What are we becoming? Are we going back to the sea? Are we growing new organs, ones even more infused with life and skill than the placenta? Because the future depends on it?I don’t know. I literally have no idea And that’s never going to change. But I am going to be writing about it, all of it, still. See you on the other side. ​