A Meditation: Waves, Beach

At the western boundary of our coast, the ocean rumbles and thumps.  The closer I get to ocean noise, the better I can think.  Loud water is soothing; waterfalls, showers, heavy rain or pounding surf clarify my thinking and cleanse my mind of distraction.  

The ocean is deadly and has no emotion, and yet it inspires every emotion in the human heart.  One's vision is instantly broadened at land's edge; the sea demands attention, and yet its sound provides a still place for your thoughts, a backdrop of white noise, a meditation.  

The land has a lumpy, undulating edge where it meets the ocean. Granite rock and sandstone is abused by the rush of heavy surf and gentle trickles alike.  Very few people go to the shore who do not stop and gaze at it.  Nearly everyone goes west to that ragged edge of land and feels an inward turn of their mind.  

I saw a small girl who wore lavendar pants and pink rainboots.  She stood on a boulder just past the tide's rush with the look of a person intent on discovery and possibility.  Her hair was tangled and loose in the onshore gusts of cold air, and she looked a wild thing, both old and young all at once, timelessly feminine and unaware of her own potential.  She was quiet while the ocean roared.

The ocean has moods and induces states of mind.  The pace of swells, the size of waves and sometimes the cold slap of wind against your skin excite or soothe your hopes or fears.  What you bring to the shore, you most likely will leave off; fear becomes joy, confidence becomes contentment, or sadness becomes acceptance. 

Maybe it's the incessant sweep of waves or maybe it's that odd feeling of inevitability that a huge ocean's restless energy stirs within you.  Maybe it's the innate knowledge that the ocean and your own blood are nearly the same. The sea has a never-ending quality of movement and changeability, mystery and threat, but also inscrutability.  Every wave is beautiful even though always dependably the same.  

That tension and balance between what is known and what cannot be known, of what is out beyond the surf and what is in your own heart, is a recognition that you and it exist in an infinite continuum.  It's just water out there, but it moves.  It moves and moves you inside but stills you, too, until you cannot be still and must move also.  Even then, compelled to move, you find that the kinetic nature of the ocean has brought you calm and peace, a tranquility you hadn't even been aware was missing until you found it.   

Badgers and Whale Poo

In a strangely redeeming way, marauding badgers and pooping whales are heroic.

In Idaho, where any form of life that competes with human hunters for game and grazing rights is shot on sight, badger populations have been eradicated wholesale.  So have wolves, coyotes, bobcats, mountain lions, foxes, feral cats and dogs, and any other "varmint" on four legs.  Consequently, prey species have run amok at times.

Currently, pelicans are becoming a nuisance at lakes where fishermen want to fish, dammit.  So what are they going to do to control them?  Reintroduce badgers.  I'm thinking that once pelicans are obliterated, the badgers will be escorted to the door and their furry rear ends booted out again.  So there you go, a redneck conservation plan, plain and simple-minded.

Next, we turn our attention to the ocean.  There, as you know, whaling ships have been prowling for a few centuries, taking whales for meat, blubber and various other useful products.  In the past, say, 40 years or so, the Japanese, and a few Scandinavian countries have turned whaling into a scorched-earth industry where huge whale processing plants, aka ships, haul in every whale they can get their hands on and turn them into cat food and sushi.  Yum.  It's still happening in spite of laws restricting catches to those needed to perform "research."

A worrisome new problem has emerged.  The oceans are slowly and steadily becoming more acidified.  Reefs are dying and other species like krill are struggling, badly in some cases.  The situation is now being studied around the world.  If the oceans die, we are dead, so this is a big problem.  One solution is to dump huge quantities of iron into the water to neutralize the acid.  It would have to be done consistently and repeatedly for years to come, possibly forever.  That could get expensive, you know?  No one's really happy with that idea right now. But wait, what about the normal balance of life?  What about what the whales' role is in it all?  

A few smart people sat down, as they do a few times a day, and one of them connected a few dots.  The solution?  Whale poo.

Whales and what whales add to the ocean -- poo (technically called feces, but you can also call it a lot of other things) -- exist in smaller numbers than they would if people were not harpooning them around the world on a daily basis.  No whales, no whale poo, not good, excrementally speaking.

Here's the simple loop that has been trashed by trawlers and whalers:  Whales eat krill, which are iron rich.  The whales digest the krill and then poop.  The poop releases iron into the ocean water that consequently neutralizes the ocean's acidity.  In non-acid water, krill populations remain robust and abundant, the whales have more krill to eat, they poo, the ocean is neutralized....and you see how it goes.

We are a species that is relatively new to the whole planet -- relative to insects, micro-organisms, fish and so on -- and we keep finding ourselves the clumsy kid in the sandbox.  We have barged around knocking things over, smashing the furniture, crushing everything we touch.  We keep discovering we've ruined things to a point of no repair or that we need to spend a lot of time patching up the stupid messes we've made.  Indigenous people who lived in nonindustrial times took the time to listen and look at what was going on around them instead of watching TV, so there was less intrusion on checks and balances in the natural world.  We don't do that, so we keep creating acid rain, acid oceans, dead zones, gyres of plastic and creating Superfunds to clean up after ourselves.  Here we think we are so darned smart.

So, the lesson is:  Whale poo is your friend and badgers would never have let the pelicans raid the fishponds in the first place if we had been paying attention.  Awesome.