Dream of the Dying Sea Lion
Craig Chalquist, PhD
When I look out on the dense buildings and roadways covering the earth and imagine instead living in a culture that genuinely serves nature, that would rather praise than pave, my grief rushes up inside me. The truth of the need to serve nature, I suggest, is in the tears.
-- Andy Fisher, Radical Ecopsychology
I dreamed last night that a sea lion came swimming up to see me. He settled wearily to the ground right in front of me. Somehow I was in the water with him but on dry land too.It was as though we were old friends, but as I looked at him, I could see that his underside was red and cracked and that he was losing a lot of weight. It was, I realized, because of all the pollutants and runoffs we humans were pouring into the oceans, creating dead spots and turning the great waters of our planet to acid.
Not knowing what to do about this unthinkably stupendous catastrophe, a catastrophe the majority of us refuse even to imagine, I put my arms around his rubbery neck and felt my heart clench and spasm with such an outpouring of grief that tears began running down my face onto his.
I wonder whose dream this was. Mine, or his? Or both, a sharing across minds and ecologies?
There was a time when we could anthropocentrically dismiss such dreams as mere masks for inner troubles to be gotten over or put aside. Today, late in August of 2008, I awaken in the near certainty that a once-graceful, wrinkled being like that in my dream will roll up dead on some beach tomorrow. Then he will be irretrievably gone, and so will be a sea-lion-shaped piece of my soul, of yours, of everyone’s, of Earth’s.