The Protagonist
I’m on Bird Island, South Georgia, in the Southern Atlantic Ocean (Johnson and Wilkerson Citation2021)
I’m here for Lola, not so much the scientists.
Scientists are an enigma to me in how they labor in metamorphosis & manifestations of all things.
I’m outside their tent. I hear them talking. I’m thinking about going inside.
No. I’ll listen from outside. Too many exhausting words floating about.
I talk to Lola. We talk in the ways that interspecies animals talk to each other.
In ways that are both more & less than words.
Lola & I speak with touch, movements, small gestures, sound and our eyes.
Rumi said: “There is a voice that doesn’t use words. Listen.” (https://www.leverageedu.com/blog/rumi-quotes/)
This is the how me and Lola speak. The wordless voice.
Some of the scientists think it’s strange & crazy.
Some understand & talk to Lola with sweet humor.
It is simply interspecies energy & consciousness.
Too often human animals find these conversations peculiar.
But it happens all the time, everywhere, mostly unaware. Intuition.
It is me, a woman, from the first bacteria & Lola, a wondering albatross, from the first bacteria.
A way of talking. A shared ancestry.
Seahorse & the Revolution
Yes, Seahorse, everything should start with beauty (Madison, Citation2022).
I learned this from you. You start with unimpeachable beauty as the cause to fight.
Your homeplace of coral reefs are so much like you/fecund & infinitely shaped by colors.
How many times must we declare the reefs as bustling ocean cities where so much life depends.
Another battlefield. A changing climate.
Floating radiance & boundless colors are made pallid & motionless as a ghost town.
Your chameleon colors & mating rituals are held among the corals & where time keeps them.
Another battlefield. A changing Climate.
I’m writing my fieldnotes notes in detail to you & as a reference/source for our revolutions.
We pacifists defy the passive.
I’ve lost count of how many revolutions. I’ll start keeping the numbers in my journal.
Fieldnotes are my map for one revolution at a time.
Lola-my wandering albatross is holding every sentiment & sentence on these pages.
For Change.
You taught me love & beauty are the bare bones of life.
I know this is why we fight & write & create & speak & learn & keep healthy & change.
You are my teacher.
Every story of a planetary being – from the first sound – that lived and sacrificed for the
protection of this planet are the lyrics of Seahorse Songs.
Every story of a human animal – from the first prisoner & those standing before the firing squad are the lyrics of Seahorse Songs.
You are my root metaphor. My hippocampus memory & imagination.
You are brain and poetry.
As it is with my other travels in this so long a journey. I will dedicate these fieldnotes to you.
For love & energy
For Change.
Life Partners
This was the way of Lola and Seth.
The mating dance began when Seth landed on the island first.
He performed his very best to attract a mate.
His mate would become the one & only.
The wandering albatross mating dance may take several years.
Finding the one & only mate is not a quick/easy ritual.
It requires experience, skill, elaboration.
When one albatross is attracted to another albatross
they will come together & begin the Display Bout.
They will observe each other’s movements & vocalizations.
They will prance, dance, spread their wings in complicated formations.
They will embellish their performance into an impressive spectacle.
They will raise their head straight to the skies. Their voice trumpeting loud piercing sounds.
They will tap their beaks in rhythmic, clapping, flirtations.
This courtship performance may take years to perfect. Years of prowess flirtations.
Once the couple chooses each other – a forever reliance – their future is family.
They meet each mating season.
Lola and Seth have met for over twenty mating seasons.
There is inclusion inside albatross mating seasons.
This is an existential inclusion across the animal world. Global.
Same sex mating rituals & life partnerships are a natural belonging. Before antiquity.
Anomalous to certain human animals unconscious of dedicated beginnings. Oblivion.
Global belongings prevail. Always.
Change.
The Ways of Lola and Seth and The Chicks
Couples who choose to birth chicks lay one egg every two years.
Time, labor, energy are required for the survival of each chick.
Lola & Seth build their nest together.
They incubate the egg together for 11 months.
Once Lola lays their egg incubation becomes an inborn division of labor.
Lola & Seth take turns sitting on the egg keeping it warm & safe.
Lola will forage across the water for food while Seth incubates the nest.
Lola & Seth take turns between foraging & staying on the island caring for their baby.
It is the way of albatrosses for the hunting parent to return to the nest & regurgitate into the chick.
Lola feeds their baby chick with oils from her digested food.
As their chick grows older & stronger it is time for more independence.
Lola & Seth will start to hunt at the same time. They will visit the growing chick at longer intervals.
Take Flight.
At five weeks Lola & Seth’s chick has matured.
She survived the winter by being fed on regurgitated fish from Lola and Seth.
After nine months she is independent and ready to fly from the nest.
She may stay at sea & soar along the water for as long as five years.
She’ll fly the ocean where she will forage & join social groupings with other young albatrosses.
She is a free adult.
When she reaches eleven years of age Lola & Seth’s grownup daughter will return to the nesting site where she was born.
Lola’s Flight/ The Scientists Will Save Us
I watch as the scientists put a small machine down Lola’s throat & on her back.
They are gentle & careful. Lola doesn’t seem to care or pay much attention to them.
She seems to like them & trust them.
I know they mean well. But I don’t like it.
Putting machines on birds feels off/strange/unsettling.
It is Necessary.
The albatrosses are in danger.
The scientists want to know why.
Too many of the sea birds leave and do not return. Disappeared
More and more never come back during breeding season.
The scientists need a reason.
The insistent curiosity of scientist might save us. Perhaps. History.
I don’t worry about Lola. She will always come back.
These machines track what happens to the albatrosses at sea.
There is something about these sorts of scientists who work in these sorts of places.
They seem to be devote, driven, on a mission.
The scientists will know the truth when Lola returns.
I still do not like them putting that machine down Lola’s throat & fixing it to her back.
It is necessary. The necessary can be so unpoetic (Molebatsi, Citation2021).
Bad News
One of the scientists comes to my tent.
I had fallen asleep earlier as I was making sketches of Lola in my journal
when I woke up from a bad dream.
I decided to draw images of the dream & then started writing what I remembered.
I dreamed an albatross spread her massive wings & flew thousands of miles at sea in search of food for her young. As she soared along the ocean’s surface/she saw countless sea birds frightened, bounded, deformed from fishing nets. The albatross looked away & flew far southward to a remote island where she saw more of what she did not want to see: wounded & disfigured baby sea birds choking – their small wings broken – as they lay quivering all along the grasses & mud on their nesting island. The chicks were overtaken by an invasion of rodents – alien predators brought to the island by humans. The chicks were left to die. The Albatross immediately turns away to escape the horror but flies further into the abyss of extinction to discover thousands of more albatrosses – just like her – desperately struggling to swim toward the surface to breath. A long fishing line envelopes them & drags the mighty birds down below the water’s surface. The drowning albatross are unintentional bait-catch. The fishermen will grab some of them & cut their beaks. He will then throw them back into the water. He has no need for these mighty majestic seabirds. They are sea trash to him.
He is fishing for the Blue Fin tuna to sell. He can get hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The albatross has flown home. She brought squid or krill or fish eggs for her young. But her young lay along the sand on their backs with their stomachs open. They ask mother albatross to count one by one what she sees inside. She begins counting.
plastic stir-sticks
straws
bottle caps
Styrofoam cups
a cigaret lighter
a Q-tip
a ring holder
tangled fishing-lines
party balloons
toothbrushes
lipstick tubes
a toy solde
Before the albatross could finish, she looked up & noticed a familiar woman.
The woman is a scientist. She’s seen this wreckage before. She brings sea turtles back to life.
She is holding a dead sea turtle.
She whispers to the sea turtle. Her voice is weary.
My love, plastic bags are not food or jellyfish.
Which buffet of plastic should I count inside my sea turtle?
Plastics too small to see like spices in soup? This is the infamous plastic soup.
My love, for decades you have navigated through earth’s magnetic fields
to get back to where you were born.
This year you will not be nesting in your birthplace.
You were persistent.
You were consciousness.
I’ve known you since you were a baby turtle.
Change.
The Albatross opened her wings to glide away past another thousand miles of ocean.
I woke up from this dream that was not a dream.
The scientist asks me what I’m doing.
I tell him I’m drawing Lola soaring over the carnage of plastic.
His eyes are glossy.
He looks like the world is about to end.
We have the footage of Lola from the tracking monitor.
We can now confirm why so many albatrosses are not returning to their breeding ground.
We traced Nola to an illegal fishing boat.
Unintended bait-catch. The fishing line entangled her.
She tried with all her strength to set herself free, to come to the water’s surface for air.
The fishing line dragged her further down.
She could not breath. She drowned.
They cut her beak and threw her back into the water.
Lola is dead.
Seth
It is near time for breeding season.
Seth will soon come to the island to meet Lola. They have been breeding for 20 years.
Mates for life.
Seth will wait for Lola. She will not come.
He will search the nest for her. He will not find her.
Albatrosses mourn.
Seth will mourn for Lola.
Birds have the same brain areas, hormones, neurotransmitters as a human brain.
The scientist say we may not know when they feel – what they feel – but they can feel.
They feel as human animals feel.
Lola is dead. Do human animals feel?
The scientist told me the morning period may take about two years.
He said some albatrosses never seem to stop mourning.
Seth will wonder where Lola could be.
What happened to her?
He will wait & then he will look for her along the island.
He will wait again.
He will wait alone.
Mates for life.
A liquid Belonging (Dyson, Citation2023)
Change.
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43997/the-rime-of-the-ancient-mariner-text-of-1834)
My dearest Seahorse:
I will be leaving this island soon.
The Scientists will be here for Seth & to do the work they must do here.
I will be diving down to the corals for meditation & to think in colors.
I will meet you there.
I need to remember Lola with more precision & imagination.
This is why I must be with you and the corals.
I read Coleridge again as a balm for my sadness/ my feelings of revenge & rage & hatred.
This is what pacifist do to be effective activist? We read poetry.
I read an 18th century poem by a fervent/abolitionists/romantic poet.
He was deeply moved & saddened when he heard about the senseless murder of an albatross.
He was so moved that he wrote a narrative poem about it that so moves me. Especially now.
The poem begins when a very old man approaches a group of wedding guests
on their way to the wedding party.
As the old man tells his story
two of the guests are anxious to join the fun and leave the old man for the party.
One of the guests remains. He is much too interested in the story to leave.
The old man begins by describing how 200 Young sailors on a voyage
become stranded at sea as fierce winds & rain plunge their ship with deadly force
to the South Pole where the sailors remain stuck in ice.
Amid their bad fortune an albatross soaring over the ship appears before the sailors.
The albatross comes to their rescue. The ice begins to break.
The boat &the young men are free.
Grateful. The sailors become friends with the sea bird for saving their lives.
Then – for no reason – the Mariner kills the albatross.
The sailors are angry. The albatross is believed to be a good omen & bearer of good fortune.
After the sea bird is killed great suffering befalls the ship.
Waters/winds/sickness/cosmic forces rise against them.
The sailors tie the dead corpse of the albatross around the Mariner’s neck.
Many years pass.
The sailors are suffering in heat/ hunger/ thirst.
One night a ship approaches them guided by two skeletons.
The skeleton of Death & the skeleton of Life-in-Death.
The two skeletons gamble to determine who will win the soul of the Mariner.
The skeleton of Life-in-Death wins.
The Mariner will never die but live forever with the albatross tied to his neck.
The Skeleton of Death overtakes the shipmates/their eyes will be eternally open
in condemnation of the Mariner.
We understand the young sailor who killed the albatross is the Ancient Mariner
telling the story to the wedding guest.
He is life-in-death/unable to die.
It is believed the Ancient Mariner’s story is a lesson of partial redemption.
He eventually learned how to love all “God’s creatures” but he was not absolved for his crime.
The Ancient Mariner’s ultimate sacrifice & gift to us is that he is forever sentenced to travel the world telling his story. The further punishment is that he will suffer pain that can only end when he tells his story to the end. When his body is filled with pain/he must tell the story again until pain stops.
On and on and on.
Stranger after stranger – over the globe – will learn the truth of his past.
He destiny is to spread lessons of love & respect for all life.
It is painful to keep the lessons silent.
When the Ancient Mariner reached the end of his story
the wedding guest decides not to go to the party but to return home.
He needs to think more deeply about what he learned & how he had been
changed.
God is Change & Earthseed Revolution
All that you touch (Butler, Citation1993)
You Change.
All that you Change
Changes you.
The only lasting truth
Is Change
God
Is Change.
From Earthseed: Book of the Living
Earthseed is a belief system that God is Change.
Earthseed was founded by Lauren Oya Olamina.
She is a fictional character created by Octavia Butler in her book, Parable of the Sower.
I like to refer to Butler’s character as Oya.
Oya tried many times to name what she knew & felt was God. But to no avail.
She then decided her ideas about God would be nameless.
One day she was weeding in the backyard & she found the name.
It appeared when she thought about the many ways plants seed themselves through water/air/animals/insects/ birds and far away from the origins of their parent plants.
They have no ability or power to move on their own. Yet, they move.
Through changes in the universe seeds circle the world in generations & weed themselves.
The name came to Oya.
She did not invent it or create it.
She simply found it.
She wrote that she tried to dump the name – to change it – but she could not.
It felt like the “truest” thing she’d ever written.
EARTHSEED REVOLUTIONARIES
Pacifism is not passivism it is activism.
I’m thinking.
We are making a revolution to end all forms of violence and destruction to our planet.
We are like the Ancient Mariner because if we stop telling our truths/stories it will hurt us.
I believe all this to be true. May I suggest we refer to ourselves as Earthseed Revolutionaries?
Thinking about Earthseed framed by Lauren Oya Olamina & conceived by Octavia Butler
may these notes from Parable of the Sower be a beginning point for realities of
what we can believe to be true?
REALITIES OF CHANGE
The truth is the continuing reality of the universe is change.
All life is constituted by change.
Existential change cannot be stopped.
The greatest planetary force is change.
God is change.
REALITIES OF WHAT AN EARTHSEED REVOLUTION CAN MAKE
We can shape change.
We can alter the speed of change.
We can alter the impact of change.
We can make change.
In closing and in the meantime/may we keep spreading our truths in care of each other’s pain? (Pezzullo, Citation2023)
My dear Seahorse–
I hope this makes sense. I will meet you at the corals very soon. In care.
∼∼∼∼
End of Journal entry for wandering albatrosses and the place where I met Lola .
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
References
- Butler, O. E. (1993). Parable of the sower. Four Wall Eight Windows.
- Dyson, T. A. (2023). Liquid belonging. Pace Gallery.
- Johnson, A. E., & Wilkerson, K. K. (2021). All we can save: Truth, courage, and solutions for the climate crises. One World Press.
- Madison, D. S. (2022). Forward. In A. Chatterjea, H. N. Wilcox, & A. L. Williams (Eds.), Dancing transnational feminisms: Ananya dance theatre and the art of social justice (pp. xii–xvi). University of Washington Press.
- Molebatsi, N. (2021). Wild (Im)perfections. Cassava Republic Press.
- Pezzullo, P. C. (2023). Beyond straw men: Plastic pollution and networked cultures. U of California Press.