Dolphins

My first encounter happened in San Diego, California, at Sea World. An old fellow, with nubs for teeth and filmed-over eyes, laid his beak in my hand and changed my life. When he did, I felt an energy that simply overwhelmed me. I was walking away from the petting pool into a kind of garden when suddenly my legs buckled and I landed on the pavement, sobbing. How I knew that energy had intelligence, I’m not sure, but I did.

I tried writing poems – love poems to a creature I did not know beyond what I had felt. My words stumbled and staggered. Eventually, I wrote six episodes about a dolphin named Sarnak. I still have those pages. Handwritten in turquoise ink as though the color in my pen could make the words less hesitant. For years I worked on Sarnak’s story, learning as much from my imagination as my research. Much of that effort will be available to readers inThe Power of Dreaming .

How does a race of beings without hands record its history? Why not create a holographic history in their watery world, a fluid history without the need for time? I have read of dolphins in a long line, surfacing for air and diving over and over again, one behind the other like a solemn ritual. Odd for these seemingly playful creatures. I witnessed the dolphins at the Naval Oceans Systems Command in San Diego swimming round and round in their tanks, a kind of rhythm to their surfacing and diving. By surfacing and diving, surfacing and diving, one behind the other in a circle, my dolphin characters create Dolphin Dreaming, and include humans in the experience.

Since writing Ah-Mah and The White Crown, I have heard from two different sources that native Americans have legends that speak of Dolphin Dreaming.