A Poem by Wallace J. Nichols. Provided by Fins Attached
If you’ve been paying attention all these years you know that like a conveyor belt a shark can continuously replace lost teeth over and over again. A shark’s body is covered with dermal “teeth” that give it hydrodynamic advantages. Pores connected to nerves act as a sixth sense and read electrical signals from prey. A shark’s jaws aren’t attached to its cranium. You might say that it is supremely efficient for hunting and eating from nose to tail, from skin to skeleton.
Now, feel the shark.
Not with your fingers, but with your entire, complex and exquisite nervous system.
Put aside what you think you know — and really feel the shark.
From deep in your amygdala, the seat of primitive emotions, to the tips of your toes a shark feels like a shiver.
Bathed in dopamine, your brain on shark is rewarded with precisely what it has always craved.
Addiction isn’t too strong a word. In fact, it’s precisely the correct word.
If you pull the electric threads that make up each wave in that shiver you’ll discover awe, lust, fear, longing, strength, hunger, jealousy and that you are right at home.
Feel the shark.
It’s said that you remember most and understand best when you feel. So, feel.
With a flash from its black eye, the cut of its dorsal fin or the flick of its tail, the shark demands that you feel. There’s nothing polite about it. It all happens so quickly.
Meanwhile, the front of your brain works to make sense of shark memories, films, stories, prose, information and context.
Together your modern and ancient mind simultaneously asks every neuron in your body the same question: what are you going to do now?
How you respond to that question will determine your future. It will decide the fate of sharks. And it will foreshadow what our planet’s single greatest feature, the ocean, becomes.
Does your body-mind tell you to live? Yes it does.
You can never comprehend the ocean until you feel the shark. You’ll never fully feel the shark until you know your own mind. And you have just scratched the surface. Congratulations.
Feel the shark.
Know yourself. Comprehend the ocean. Love.