04.03.2021

I see you.

I feel you.

I hear you.

I believe (in) you.

Years ago it was, I had this dream. I was on a yacht travelling backwards at speed and I couldn't see land anywhere. I didn't know how to get off it and no one could hear me shouting into the wind.

I was sitting on the transom with my feet dangling helplessly over the side. Salt spray on my face so far from home. I watched as the ocean cleaved to a massive dark shadow rising from depths I couldn't fathom.

A blue whale began to breach the surface travelling with the boat, his head continuing to rise out of the water until his eye was level with mine. It was the size of my head. I saw myself and a whole other life within a blink.

For a long hanging moment our souls met again. It shifted something deep within me. Knocked china off the shelf, shook the floor, broke me open and out from under that terrible spell.

I woke up with wet cheeks, still a long way from home but with my jaw set differently as I sat up in bed. That dream slowly turned my own little boat around. It took time to haul myself from that dark ocean with just my own arms around me because I was all I could carry, and not every day.

But that whale never left me. Still his eye blinks in mine. He surfaces in my consciousness and my mornings whenever I need him without fail. Yesterday the first whale was spotted travelling north past the coast where I live, early and just in time.

Now he blinks at you too.

When everybody else is bending with the wind, very few people will lean against it.

~ Witi Ihimaera

Author of the beautiful Whale Rider, made into one of my favourite movies.