Close Encounters — Sam Osherson

When my son graduated high school, we took a trip to Key West as a celebration. As we snorkeled in the Gulf, a school of dolphins arrived to investigate us. Amazed, my son and I swam among them for a period of time. Then one came close and floated vertically directly in front of me barely two feet away. I was stunned and uncertain what to do. We “stood” there observing each other for several seconds. I saw the curve of his mouth, his green eyes, the dark greyness of his sleek skin and the whiteness on his underbelly. He seemed “taller” than me.

What he made of me was unclear, but we definitely “met” each other.

Years later, off the Galapagos Islands, I watched several sea lions playing around our small boat. Our guide asked me if I wanted to go into the water with him and “visit with them.” Well, you don’t have to ask me something like that twice. We grabbed our snorkels and dived into the water. The sea lions continued their play, undisturbed. Except for one mother—she came over to the two of us, with her baby in tow. The mother sea lion was quite large. It was just the four of us, yards from the boat. I hesitated: “Is she protective of her pup?” I’d seen the teeth, during yawns. “She is relaxed,” our guide, Diego, assured me. The two humans and the two sea mammals inspected each other, the pup as near to my mask as I could ever ask. His eyes, like mine, were wide and curious.

Again, for several seconds I floated motionless, while the mother and baby examined me. And I did the same: their chocolate skin, deep dark eyes, and the wonderful bushy whiskers, even on the baby. Then the mother and her baby went on their way. I erupted to the surface and exclaimed to Diego, “did you see what happened?” “Yes,” he replied, “she was showing you her baby. Sea lions do that.”

Sea lion curiosity, dolphin curiosity, human curiosity – they all seemed primal, fundamental, same. Something deeper, too, perhaps: the need to break out of our isolated experience as a species trapped in our own ways of knowing. For a moment, dolphin met human, sea lion met human, and this human felt the exhilaration of a cross-species connection.

Source: Santiago Berjarano, with permission

These cross-species moments of connection and regard were whole body experiences for me – electric flashes of enchantment that left me with a sustained, sustaining sense of gratitude. They awakened in me a sense of kinship with these beings, and a recognition of a long-forgotten knowledge within myself, too: we are not separate from them, created on a different day; we are part of them. And they are part of us.

Sometimes people who have visited exotic locations to observe animal life come back with stories of messages from the objects of their attention. Often, the animal being— perhaps an elephant, a lion, an owl, an eagle — has a message of encouragement and inspiration for the human being-- a real-life Aslan speaking to the children of Narnia.

I once attended a presentation in which the speaker described such an encounter with a lion at a preserve in Africa. She was seated in a land rover as “the lion said to me, ‘I can feel you, can you feel me? Don’t be afraid. You carry so much fear. Stop being afraid. Show yourself, the real you. I see you, I know you. I love you. When will you know yourself, when will you love yourself?’ The lion then walked away.”

I haven’t (yet!) gotten such existential messages from my treasured encounters with wild animals. Perhaps we hear — or feel — what we need at the moment of such encounters. That miraculous moment off Key West took place at a time in my life when I was worried about one of my children about to leave home. Seeing a dolphin parent—I imagined him a father-- gave me a comforting perspective, a sense of the universality and sacredness of parenting. I felt as though the dolphin and I shared a primal love of our offspring, a primal desire to protect them. It helped.

In the Galapagos, twenty years later, I heard a different message, clear and pressing – urgent. I felt these kin asking for my help, expressing their need. What I heard from the mother sea lion with her young, was: “Do you see us? Do you understand our place on this earth? Do you know your responsibility to us? We are both alive on this planet, your species and mine; we are fellow beings, not objects here to delight you…do you understand that?”

Reflecting on the homo sapiens assumption that the natural world represents “property” or “resources” for us to manage, the novelist Richard Powers, author of the Pulitzer-winning novel, The Overstory, has commented: “Every form of mental despair and terror and incapacity in modern life seems to be related in some way to this complete alienation from everything else alive. We’re deeply, existentially lonely.”

What would it mean if we could see ourselves not as the apex of evolution, as “masters” or “stewards” of this planet, but as one species among many, as an interdependent part of the many intelligences on this planet, our survival dependent on their survival?

Sometimes I’ll lie in bed deep at night and picture the dolphin, the sea lion, out there in the wild. The thought brings me both comfort and sorrow, a yearning for a connection just out of reach.