There is a story, a Greek legend, that tells of a young boy who finds a bird with the most beautiful song in the forest. He brings it home with joy, and asks his father if they can feed it. The father doesn’t want to feed a mere bird, so he kills the bird, and with the bird he kills the song, and with the song, himself. Without the song, man is gone forever.
Humans across time and place have gathered in circles to share instructive stories such as this one. American author Joseph Campbell proposes that myths serve four key functions: to open us to mystery, to understand the shape of the universe, to facilitate social cooperation, and to teach us how to live. In a process of co-creation, myth-making can help us to understand how our everyday actions fit into the larger story of Life.
Not unlike a story, the sound of a bell in the Buddhist tradition offers an opportunity to stop and look deeply at what is going on inside us and around us. This seemingly simple practice teaches us the art of stopping. As Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh writes, “the bell invites us to see that we are the world, we are the cosmos; there is no separation. The past, the present, and the future are all contained in this moment.”
Today, our planet is warming faster than ever before. Our consumption patterns have reshaped processes as foundational as geologic layers, migration patterns, ocean circulation, and our senses of self. Wildfires, warming oceans, climbing atmospheric carbon, an uninhabitable Earth: let this be our bell. Let this be an opportunity to stop and look deeply into non-separation. Compassionate climate action is born out of this careful looking, for we come upon the profound metaphysical realization that another’s suffering is our suffering, and that we cannot be fully healthy and at peace if the world is not so. To kill the bird is to kill ourselves.
If birds have song and flight, humans have stories and fires. Gather around, my friend, and tell me a story that will wake up the world.
Story
Every couple of years, I work on a steel research brigantine that brings college students to the water. We sail through desert oceans; the boat heaves over the rolling waves of time. We give each other silly hair cuts on deck, share the work of living, and stare at the sea for hours at a time. In its otherworldliness, there is spaciousness. We are in one dream, constructing a shared reality filled with glowing phytoplankton and the Pleiades and gritty coffee at the start of the night shift.
One student decides to make dumplings. It takes the whole day. People filter in and out of the main salon, folding and pinching and laughing. There is nowhere else to go, and nowhere else to be, so we tuck bits of egg and onion and pork into circles of dough and tuck these memories into our minds. Finally, at sunset, we gather and feed one another.
While reading First Nations star mythology, the same student shares: “I want to use my life to address the climate crisis because I want humans to be able to tell stories about nature and themselves.” He understands the risk climate change poses to our bio-cultural future, and that storytelling is how we weave ourselves into the fabric of everything around us.
Stories about nature are co-created with nature; we stare into the stars so long that they become alive. When we stop and listen, the stars can change who we thought we were. Without this myth-making, man dies.
Being in the South Pacific with no land in sight provides some cognitive estrangement from society and its woes. Aboard this old boat, we re-learn interdependence and cooperation. JP makes water so that Rick can drink coffee so that the boat can sail so that Jordan can gather plankton so that Zoe can count them so that we can all smile in the knowing. Never have I seen such a beautiful example of humans coexisting. Never have I seen such synchrony, as if each human, each line, was tuned to the same note, and humming. Why must I go to the middle of the ocean to find this?
These moments lens the crises of our time. Our mind is like a microscope: adjust the focus and magnification, and just like that, the world as you move through it is different. The climate crisis challenges us to zoom out and zoom in; to look, as Steinbeck and Ricketts advised us, “from the tidepool to the stars and back again.”
When I zoom out, I see that we lack a modern myth to guide us through this great challenge. The creation of this myth is a dynamic process in which, like learning how to live on one ship in the middle of the sea, we will elevate our capacity for cooperation, self-creation, and agency.
Prayer
If prayer is our active and joyful participation in this myth-making process, then science is my prayer to the future. Through science, we can learn the shape of the world and make informed decisions grounded in compassion for life not yet born. As the prominent conservation scientist Heike Lotze writes:
“Love and compassion fuel our desire and urge for change and provide a compass that can guide our actions. Science and knowledge provide ways for collecting and interpreting data and information that can enhance our understanding and support our decisions and actions.”
In the Gulf of California, Mexico, our research team works to inform a new marine protected area that would support the recovery of the critically endangered scalloped hammerhead shark. At 3:00 AM, we climb into small fiberglass boats and lay longlines with fifteen baited hooks. It is too early to talk, so the ocean does the talking: the sky begins to color, the water hits the hull, and soon the sharks start to bite.
All of the sudden we are lifting a thrashing shark into the small boat. We have exactly seven minutes before the shark needs to be released to maximize its chances of survival: seven timeless minutes in which we must control the shark, remove the hook, cover her eyes, insert a tube of flowing seawater into its mouth and over her gills, and gather all of the samples and measurements we need.
I handle the mouth: I pull back her nose, and struggle to insert the tube. Meanwhile, local fishermen are holding down the tail. When I secure her oxygen supply, I exhale. Now we breathe together. I wonder what this is like for the shark, who has never known breath without movement, life without the continuous flick of her tail.
Each shark we catch is outfitted with a small tag that will communicate the shark’s movement patterns. That data will help us to identify their key life history areas, like nursery and feeding grounds, to protect from overfishing. We also seek to understand factors like ocean circulation patterns, larval connectivity, and fine-scale temperature variability to then create marine protected areas that will be more resilient to the threats of a warming ocean.
Lastly, the release. I pick up the juvenile hammerhead by the head and tail and resuscitate her in the water, reminding her how to swim and breathe. How delicate it all feels - her skin, her life, her species. Within seconds, she remembers strength and water, and begins to move with a sinuous simplicity. I give her a push and a quick prayer, and she swims off into the deep.
Storytellers
My experiences in conservation science in Mexico, in which there are often sailors, fishermen, scientists, and filmmakers in one tiny boat, have taught me that our ability to respond to the climate crisis hinges upon our capacity for cooperation on a planetary scale.
Coordination is a central problem in biology, and researchers have identified the cultural and evolutionary importance of storytellers who broadcast cooperative norms that coordinate group behaviour and establish meta-knowledge. Modern storytellers (see Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Ministry for the Future”) can engender plural representations of Earth’s present and future, and pose profound questions about what is possible and desirable in relation to global environmental change.
Storytellers are the facilitators of spaces from which story, prayer, and mystery emerge. Many of the finest storytellers I’ve ever met have been boat captains, who seem to intuitively know how to be silent, how to bring out the best in people and boats, and how to pass through that impossible channel and into the lagoon. The ocean is the ultimate storyteller, though, for from her salt our story of life emerges. As the evolution of life reveals, the boundaries of these generative spaces are there to be dissolved, and there is a wonderful spillover into the rest of the world.
Five years ago, my husband and I read the story of the climate scientist Dr. Peter Kalmus, who, beneath an avocado tree in his small house in Los Angeles, decarbonized his life piece by piece. Soon he was composting, foraging in dumpsters, filtering used vegetable oil, making his own rootbeer, and meditating. His life was a pilgrimage in which every act was intentional; his actions reflected his awareness of our interconnectedness. By sharing his own capacity for transformation, Kalmus established new social norms that show the individual a way forward.
Everyday I get to enjoy the wonderful spillover effects of Dr. Kalmus’ story. Reading of these experiments with living and capacity for self-creation inspired us to swap out gas and asphalt for wind and chop: we moved from a van to a sailboat, and use it as a low-carbon platform for marine conservation research and outreach in Latin America. To climb into a boat and set sail, an act ritualized for millennia to look for new futures for ourselves, felt fitting.
Living on a sailboat brings me out of the world of abstraction and into the reality of the breathing ocean. It brings me unity with our joyous, impermanent, warming surroundings, and out here, I soak in a contentment that reminds me of when I was a child and my dad and I would run barefoot across the sand to watch the rising sun.
The bell
I see humanity on a path of self-discovery. We are walking across a river in hopes of reaching the other shore. The true wisdom of life is that in each step of the way, the other shore is already reached. To reach the other shore in each step, to perform even the smallest task with the greatest care and attention, brings us in step with the story of the Universe.
Let us be like the young boy who treasures all Life. Let our hands be the hands of the Earth. Let our story be the story of awakening, and let our work be our humble offering to this phenomenal world.
There is a Chinese proverb that describes the difference between heaven and hell. In both places, there is a bountiful feast, and people sit around it with long chopsticks. In hell, the people try in vain to feed themselves; in heaven, they use their chopsticks to feed each other. When we imagine the collective feast (Earth’s beauty and bounty), and the entire biosphere past, present, and future gathered around it, we must reach across space and time to feed one another. We feed one another with poetry, nourishing food, science based in love and action, hot tea, laughter, tenderness, music, and story.
This is my vision for the world.
Enter the feast, my friend.
Audrey Bennett is a sailor, scientist, and writer. Her work explores humanity’s evolving relationship between nature and self. She lives with her husband aboard a 36-foot sloop, which serves as a low-carbon platform for marine conservation and outreach in Latin America.
Artwork by Karolina Uskakovych— a designer, artist, and filmmaker from Kyiv, Ukraine. Karolina is a co-founder of the Uzvar_Collective and Art Director for the magazine Anthroposphere: The Oxford Climate Review. She is also artist-in-residence at Re(Grounding) programme as well as the Digital Ecologies research group. Her current research explores traditional ecological knowledge in relation to gardening in Ukraine.
You are not a drop in the ocean. You are an entire ocean in a drop. Tamara Kulish.
Inspiring! Never underestimate the power of stories.