"I've never considered myself a spiritual person, but the first time I stopped the boat above a singing male, and dropped the hydrophone in the water…"

Then there is a pause for words, which are not available. This is the well from which the poets draw water, the place beyond words, where words alone are required but will never be adequate. The guest at my cousin's party spoke of arriving here a few years ago, and beginning a water tour company with her husband. Maui, as it happens, is something of a sacred site for the whales — what else but a sacred site when such large populations congregate here, as compared to other Hawaiian islands?

Stop personifying, you say? I say: avoid aggrandizing the human species: it diminishes the beauty and scale of Creation. Look at how many ways we can find the Great Spirit in our lives! A woman hears life in the sound of a whale's voice, and a window on the world opens…
A whale will point its head toward the bottom of the sea, and it's tail toward the sun, and begin to sing. The sounds carry for miles beneath the waves, and are amplified far more than sound would be in air. Sometimes, two or three or more whales will arrange themselves in a circle near one another, and create such sound… the traffic of information cannot be mistaken.

As complex as birdsong is — complex if you listen carefully enough for the variation in pitch and cadence, in melody and urgency — the language of the whales, like that of the dolphins, is amazingly varied and pronounced. 

A nephew of mine was out to Maui a couple of years ago — first time at the ocean. His father is an avid fisherman, and asked these friends to take them out to ocean fish. At one point they paused the boat — there was no head on board the small craft, so to "outhouse" was a quick dip in the sea — and the captain jumped in. A moment later he shouted up to the few passengers: "Quick! Quick!! Everyone in the water! Grab a face mask and in the water!"

As soon as he had hit the water he heard and felt the vibration of whalesong beneath him. Looking down he could see, through the crystal-clear water, a male singer only 30 feet below them. With a mask on, you could dip your head an inch beneath the water, so that your ears and eyes both took in the enormous body and voice of the oldest sea creature… speaking perhaps like an elephant speaks to its tribe.

I thought then, a moment's thought, of the Japanese whale trade pushing for access to international waters once again, after a moratorium of many years on the practice. I thought how at one time our ignorance and need allowed the killing of sentient creatures; now it is an imposed ignorance, a diminishing of intelligent life to brutish prey, used so commonly in war and in defending humans' taking of whatever they will.

Perhaps there is a line where the food chain is natural, where the need is so great that one or another will live. As a species, of course, we have choices, and we have resources beyond those enjoyed by most other creatures on this earth. If a conscious life is taken, must it not be honored as such? The indigenous tribes are reported to have prayed over their kill, knowing they had taken a life. Now we are scarcely aware of consequence, having shielded ourselves from it so meticulously. And the consequences of our ignorance so much greater, as our numbers have grown from tribes to towns, and from towns to nations.

Under the waves there is a community of ancient creatures — the caretakers of the deep? Who could say they are not?