For migratory species, motherhood is an act of danger.
Seeking what every mammals seeks,
female humpback whales, alone but for their calf,
will cross the ocean to follow that ferocious instinct
- and what choice do they have? -
of a longer life together.
Migration is an act of necessity. It's coded in our very genes.
It is the essential act
that gives the delicate seed of the future -
And I mean our very future-
a place to root.
And so, pods of female dolphins,
seeing the emaciated nursing whale mothers struggling
against their own exhaustion,
calf clinging closely,
have been observed gathering around the weary pair,
and together holding them up;
buoyant in the waves,
ancient nostrils surfacing,
filling their lungs so they may sleep.
Drifting on rafts built of altruistic cooperation.
How is it that we, thinking ourselves
the most highly evolved,
the most compassionate and logical-
will stand by, feeling no duty
to our own kin, or worse;
while our ancient mammalian cousins know in their very cells
that we are here on this wild world,
however briefly,
yet eternally,
for each other.
Perhaps this same altruistic cooperation
Is the only way that we may walk through the fires
of what is to come.
The malicious and the ambivalent shall not last long.
