Moved! Thank you for sharing Kiki!
Drone On, Please.
October 4, 2019 by 14 Comments
Shore break, Trey Ratcliff: “South Island of New Zealand. Just north of the Haast Pass on the West Coast is a pretty desolate and lonely place. In fact, the entire South Island, which is *roughly* the size of California, only has 1 mil people on it (Cali has 40 mil). Anyway, most of the west coast of the South Island is covered in a dense and beautiful forest. I found this area of the coast where the waves are undercutting the land and the trees dramatically tip over into the ocean to be battered around.” (via thisisnthappiness)
Atlas Obscura: “Drone-Piloting Scientists ‘Weighed’ Whales From 130 Feet in the Air” (via thisisnthappiness)
Miracle. All of it.
June 30, 2019 by 28 Comments
Notes: Thank you for sharing Sawsan. Inspiration: Inspired by Albert Einstein’s quote: “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”
T.G.I.F.: It’s been a long week
June 28, 2019 by 23 Comments
Giant humpback leaps from the sea in Monterey California as fisherman in small boat looks on agog. Humpback whales are in the same family as the largest beings on earth, the blue whale, and females can reach up to 50 foot long and weigh 25–30 metric tons, about five times as heavy as a fully-grown male African elephant. Don’t miss the video and other photos here: DailyMail.com. (Via Your Eyes Blaze Out)
Miracle. All of it.
September 2, 2018 by 31 Comments
The biggest heart in the world is inside the blue whale. It weighs more than seven tons. It’s as big as a room. It is a room, with four chambers. A child could walk around it, head high, bending only to step through the valves. The valves are as big as the swinging doors in a saloon. This house of a heart drives a creature a hundred feet long. When this creature is born it is twenty feet long and weighs four tons. It is waaaaay bigger than your car. It drinks a hundred gallons of milk from its mama every day and gains two hundred pounds a day, and when it is seven or eight years old it endures an unimaginable puberty and then it essentially disappears from human ken, for next to nothing is known of the the mating habits, travel patterns, diet, social life, language, social structure, diseases, spirituality, wars, stories, despairs and arts of the blue whale. There are perhaps ten thousand blue whales in the world, living in every ocean on earth, and of the largest animal who ever lived we know nearly nothing. But we know this: the animals with the largest hearts in the world generally travel in pairs, and their penetrating moaning cries, their piercing yearning tongue, can be heard underwater for miles and miles.
~ Brian Doyle, from “Joyas Voladoras”
Notes:
- Photo: Frank Brennan with “Blue whale nursing its calf just off Dana Point” via Orange County Register
- Related Posts: Miracle. All of it.
- Inspiration: Inspired by Albert Einstein’s quote: “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”
so this was obviously a devastating and silent moment
February 18, 2018 by 20 Comments
The whale on the left is an adult female. The one on the right is her male escort. We were on our way to Roca Partida when we heard that the female’s calf had been attacked by a few killer whales. When we got there, the mother was inconsolable. The male was trying to comfort her by touching her gently, but it was useless. Some of you may already know this, but it’s only the male whales who sing (while mating), so this was obviously a devastating and silent moment. The man in the photograph is my father.”
~ @rodrigofriscione, Roca Partida, Revillagigedo Archipelago
Monday Morning Wake-Up Call (Up, Up, Up, all together now)
June 12, 2017 by 35 Comments
“A photographer in Australia captured stunning images of something one might only see once or twice during the migrating season: two whales breaching in perfect synchronization. So you might say photographer Jonas Liebschner of Whale Watching Sydney hit the daily double as he saw and snapped photos of two pairs of humpback whales breaching simultaneously only seven days apart. On the second day of whale-watching season off Manley Beach north of Sydney, Australia, Liebschner took a photograph showing two humpback whales breaching in perfect tandem with flippers in identical positions before splashing down.
Grindtv.com Pairs of whales breach in perfect tandem; photographer captures the moments (June 6, 2017)
They live closer to the bone
September 18, 2016 by 23 Comments
In common parlance, the word ‘soul’ pops up everywhere…Soul music gets us swaying. We want our lover, body and soul. In each case, ‘soul’ connotes deep feeling and core values…Today, studies increasingly show that many non-human beings feel. Elephants appear to feel grief, while dolphins and whales express joy, or something much like it. Parrots can become cranky, pigs and cows terrified, chickens saddened, monkeys seemingly embarrassed. Experiments have shown that rats become agitated when seeing surgery performed on other rats and that, when presented with a trapped lab-mate and a piece of chocolate, they will free their caged brethren before eating. […]
One might even argue that other creatures are more cognisant of feelings than humans are, because they possess a primary form of consciousness: they are aware of themselves and their environment but are less burdened by complexities such as reflection and rumination that typify human consciousness. They live closer to the bone, so to speak. Jeffrey Masson, author of When Elephants Weep (1995), has remarked that animals possess feelings of ‘undiluted purity and clarity’ compared to the ‘seeming opacity and inaccessibility of human feelings.’[…]
Extraordinary examples of ensoulment among non-human animals abound. Ethologist Adriaan Kortlandt once observed a wild chimp in the Congo ‘gaze at a particularly beautiful sunset for a full 15 minutes, watching the changing colors’, forsaking his evening meal in the process. Elsewhere, African elephants belonging to the same family or group will greet one another after a separation with a loud chorus of rumbles and roars as they rush together, flapping their ears and spinning in circles. […]
A particularly striking case of animal gratitude occurred in 2005 off the California coast, where a female humpback whale was found entangled in nylon ropes used by fishermen. As recounted by Frans de Waal in The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society (2009): ‘The ropes were digging into the blubber, leaving cuts. The only way to free the whale was to dive under the surface to cut away the ropes.’ The divers spent an hour at the task, an especially risky one given the sheer strength of the animal’s tail. ‘The most remarkable part came when the whale realised it was free. Instead of leaving the scene, she hung around. The huge animal swam in a large circle, carefully approaching every diver separately. She nuzzled one, then moved on to the next, until she had touched them all.’ […]
In the end, soul may be a profound matter of fellow feeling. The stronger the capability of a given species for fellow feeling, the more that species can be said to exhibit soulfulness. To view things in this way offers another important step in humanity’s progression towards understanding its place in creation – and to appreciate the inheritance we hold in common with other sentient beings on this increasingly small, restive, and fragile planet.
~ Michael Jawer, Do only humans have souls, or do animals possess them too? | Aeon Ideas
Photo: Humpback whale bubbles by Scott Portelli (via lovely seas)
Deep
April 19, 2016 by 22 Comments
The way is not really a way.
It is a depth.
It is not a distance.
~ Mooji, “Inspirational – Into the Deep” from White Fire
Notes:
- Thank you Val Boyko for her inspirational post: Inspiration – Into the Deep and for Mooji quote.
- Photo: National Geographic – Whale of a Tail by Shane Gross: “A sperm whale “waves goodbye” to Shane Gross, who had traveled to Sri Lanka’s east coast hoping to photograph blue whales. “While we did have some success with the blues, it was the sperm whales that stole the show,” he writes. He captured this picture toward the end of the six-day expedition. “It was late in the day and the sun was low as this small pod swam toward me, and I did my best to keep quiet so as to not frighten them. This one started to dive and I free dove right after her, trying to get as close to that massive tail as possible. I knew she might be the last whale I’d encounter on the trip, and indeed, she was.”
Ah!
March 15, 2016 by 7 Comments
The first word “Ah”
blossoms into others
All of them true.
~ Kukai, 774–835, Japanese monk, civil servant, scholar, poet.
Notes:
- Poem: Thank you Mindfulbalance
- Drone photo of Orca pod: Orcaempire, and be sure to check out the amazing site here: Orca Empire) via (Your Eyes Blaze Out)
