Dolphin clicks travel through the water to places not seen. Echoes of the unseen bounce back to the pod so that they can coordinate their direction. Your human superpower is imagination: Picturing what is NOT there. You can click, click—”not that, not that”—until something new echoes back to the pod. Clicking together we can move to places that none of us could find alone. That’s how we make waves.
Seahorse-play it out of your head. Seahorses are nature’s way of playing jazz. Not because they have faces like a clarinet, but because they are not playing the same old tune. Daily dance-dates, pregnant dads, vertical movement instead of horizontal! They are fish with no scales, no stomach, no teeth and terrible swimmers. Yet, they have their niche in the complex web of life. You are in that complex web too. Like a good jazz ensemble, players in the web start clicking when they listen closely to each other as they play.
And while the seahorses do not have scales, stomach or teeth, the starfish don’t even have brains. Yet with their thousands of tube feet stuck fast to some rock, they “know” how to fling off an arm to escape a trauma. More impressive…millions of versatile cells start communicating in the star to collectively create a new arm. So why not you? Imagine “not this” with us. Fling off the troubled part. Regenerate something new with our supporting cast of cell-ebrities.
Rainforest birds flock not just with their own kind but with other species. They forage and find protection side-by-side in the understory, the overstory, and in between. Flocking is observing, listening and responding to others. Flocking is acting in a common story. Let’s flock to a new canopy and create a multi-storied tangle of tunes.
Traces of DNA and RNA from forest-life get into the streams. Forest streams don’t stay in the understory. They trickle, merge, and meander until they find the sea. In coastal coves, fresh water meets salt water in a dance of different densities. Currents swirl, nutrients mix, and something new emerges. Our imagination, our regenerated thoughts, our collective stories are different flows mixing, remixing, and streaming towards a new, unseen place of change.
