Resource from Alison: As we're closing with vibration, I wanted to share about sperm whales and their powerful clicks (maybe you already know this).
Their clicks are so loud they can communicate with each other across the planet.
Their vibrations are so powerful they can numb a human body, cause our bodies to heat up if we are interacting with them, or vibrate a human to death.
They don't use ears underwater, they collect echoes along their bellies.
Sperm whale-human interaction and connection is emerging.
I liked James Nestor's video, where he shares about free diving with these amazing beings. I experienced him as having awe and respect and curiosity.
Here's the video I watched (the first 2-5min you can hear the clicks):
Storytelling and the Art of Tenderness: Olga Tokarczuk’s Magnificent Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech
This optics of the self, the way in which the individual becomes “subjective center of the world,” is the defining feature of this most recent chapter of the history of our species. And yet everything around us reveals its illusory nature, for as the great naturalist John Muir observed, “when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”
With an eye to her lifelong fascination with “the systems of mutual connections and influences of which we are generally unaware, but which we discover by chance, as surprising coincidences or convergences of fate, all those bridges, nuts, bolts, welded joints and connectors”
Tokarczuk reflects on our creativity not as some separate and abstract faculty but as a fractal of the living universe:
We are all — people, plants, animals, and objects — immersed in a single space, which is ruled by the laws of physics. This common space has its shape, and within it the laws of physics sculpt an infinite number of forms that are incessantly linked to one another. Our cardiovascular system is like the system of a river basin, the structure of a leaf is like a human transport system, the motion of the galaxies is like the whirl of water flowing down our washbasins. Societies develop in a similar way to colonies of bacteria. The micro and macro scale show an endless system of similarities.
Our speech, thinking and creativity are not something abstract, removed from the world, but a continuation on another level of its endless processes of transformation.
We sever this dazzling indivisibility whenever we contract into what she calls “the uncommunicative prison of one’s own self”
She calls for something beyond empathy, something achingly missing from our harsh culture of dueling gotchas — a literature of tenderness:
Tenderness is the art of personifying, of sharing feelings, and thus endlessly discovering similarities. Creating stories means constantly bringing things to life, giving an existence to all the tiny pieces of the world that are represented by human experiences, the situations people have endured and their memories. Tenderness personalizes everything to which it relates, making it possible to give it a voice, to give it the space and the time to come into existence, and to be expressed.
Echoing Iris Murdoch’s unforgettable definition of love as “the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real,” Tokarczuk adds:
Tenderness is the most modest form of love. It is the kind of love that does not appear in the scriptures or the gospels, no one swears by it, no one cites it. It has no special emblems or symbols, nor does it lead to crime, or prompt envy.
It appears wherever we take a close and careful look at another being, at something that is not our “self.”
Tenderness is spontaneous and disinterested; it goes far beyond empathetic fellow feeling. Instead it is the conscious, though perhaps slightly melancholy, common sharing of fate. Tenderness is deep emotional concern about another being, its fragility, its unique nature, and its lack of immunity to suffering and the effects of time. Tenderness perceives the bonds that connect us, the similarities and sameness between us. It is a way of looking that shows the world as being alive, living, interconnected, cooperating with, and codependent on itself.