We humans like to think we’re in charge.

We like to think that we’re making decisions, charting the course of our lives, being creative.

In fact, most of what we think, say, and do is driven by a level of habituation that we can scarcely imagine. We are, fundamentally, an extraordinarily complex collection of conditioned habits, laid in through a combination of genetics, culture, and psychological shaping. Everything we believe about the world, what is worth doing, and how to respond in life is embedded in physiology. As such, every perception and interpretation is a manifestation of particular groups of neurons biologically entrained to fire together. How we lead our lives is constrained by this truth: we can only take actions that our nervous systems allow us to take.

Meanwhile, an infinity of possibilities lies just out of reach… available to us in principle, but inaccessible because of our hard-wired predispositions.

Our favorite TV show, Brothers and Sisters, features basically likeable and good people engaging in behaviors that are both destructive and astoundingly predictable. We watch them on screen, practically leaping out of our seats: “Stop! Don’t do that! You have a choice!”

We all do such automatic behaviors; the main difference between them and us is that we get to watch them on TV. If this sounds grim, I apologize. While I'm not actually a proponent of determinism (the belief that our lives and destinies are set,) the truth is closer to this than most of us imagine.

Yet, we do have choice. It’s just that most of us are asleep at the wheel most of the time. The trick is to learn to witness ourselves, to watch ourselves on the screen of our awareness as we move through life.

Human development can be seen as a process of waking up to the choices that were there all the time. When we witness the nature of our habituation, when we open to the possibilities that our habits previously screened out, we have a moment of real choice.

As we develop, we see that we are the only person we could be: the perfect and inevitable product of the conditions that gave rise to us.

And, we are the author of our own lives. As we wake up to this choicefulness, we become less and less driven by our habits, and more able to consciously author.

We live in an extraordinary time, in which the fundamental structures of the environmental, social, and economic fabric that supports our culture and very existence are shifting in significant ways. We are also authors of the world, in the midst of this shift; every action that we take or don’t take affects the whole in a chain of causality that is inconceivably complex. A special responsibility comes with the recognition of this authorship; giraffes and slugs presumably also author the world in their own ways, but are not cognizant of it.

EcoSomatic Leadership requires that we awaken not only to the nature of our own habituation, but also to the global context in which we are living. Living in this awareness, we are connected to ourselves and to the whole living system of which we are a living expression. We become increasingly at choice about how we author. We evolve into living in a set of commitments that are relevant to the world that we choose to bring forward.

This is the fundamental work of our time.

Join Henry Kimsey-House (co-founder of CTI) and me in an on-going community to explore this. We begin with a virtual conference on Tuesday, Feb. 21. And, we offer an eight day intensive in New Mexico in September. Click for more on these events.

Our three week trip was, in part, a medical trip, and in part an experiment in living fully in the face of Walker’s MdDS.

The illness is not better, although she is more resilient in working with it. The only researcher on the planet studying this terrible affliction is at UCLA; we had an appointment with her that took us to the W. Coast.

With that as a starting point, we became resourceful. We put together frequent flier miles, a friend’s casita in Baja to stay in, good friends in Hawaii, and a daughter in SF into a respite experiment. It included our 27^th anniversary (Feb. 2,) for which we wished to celebrate with a time-out from the busyness of the lives we have created. We were in need of the peace of wildness. We were ready for the jaw-dropping majesty of being with the most magnificent sentient beings the Earth has every birthed: the blue whales, greys and humpbacks of Baja and Hawaii.

It is, generally, our intention to push back on the limitations that Walker’s condition imposes on us. We are experimenting with the boundaries of what we can do, while also respecting the fragility of her nervous system. We took this trip mindfully and slowly, knowing this is necessary if travel is to be possible at all. My habitual urgency to experience everything is being gradually replaced by deep gratitude for Walker and appreciation for what each moment offers.

The UCLA doctor generously gave us three hours of her time, an unusual experience in medicine. It was helpful to get her perspective and her confirmation of Walker’s diagnosis. At the same time, there are no miracles on the horizon, no approaches to treatment that we’ve not thought of or already tried. This was not a surprise, nor even really disappointing. We are still facing what we’re facing; life sometimes shows up in inarguable facts.

Regardless of what did or did not happen at UCLA, we are more alive from declaring it important to be in the presence of 50 foot long highly intelligent whales, who live as they have lived for hundreds of thousands of years, and who celebrate, love their young, and thrive, for now, in a changing world. We are more alive from spending three weeks together, listening to what calls us, and being in wild places. We are more alive from experiencing ourselves as part of the whole of life: miraculous, changing, unfolding.

We are learning to let life live through us, enjoying the precious moments we have, being led by love.

Yes, I had the wonderful experience of kissing a whale! My lips, her forehead. I avoided the barnacles, and her smooth skin was surprisingly soft, for a 40 ton animal. It was both mutual and truly a moving experience...[click on the picture to view slide show]

These beautiful grey whales migrate 6000 miles south from the Bering Sea in winter to Baja California, where we visited them. Adults weigh up to 35 tons, and can be 45 feet long. Almost hunted to extinction by the 1970’s, they have made a remarkable comeback and now number in the tens of thousands worldwide. Several hundred show up to winter in San Ignacio Lagoon, on the West coast of the Baja peninsula to overwinter and to give birth to calves that weigh 1 ½ tons. After barely three months of nursing and hanging out in the lagoon, these amazing creatures head back north on one of the longest migrations of any mammal on earth.

The Mexicans called the grey whales “devilfish,” because they were fierce fighters, and therefore dangerous, when harpooned. Around the time of their near-extinction in the early 1970’s, a San Ignacio fisherman named Pachico Mayoral noticed a whale approaching his boat. Afraid, he tried to get away, but the whale followed, staying with the boat for an hour, rubbing up against the boat, and clearly initiating contact. Sensing no aggression, Mayoral relaxed, and soon the whales were touching, and being touched.

A small eco-tourism business has since sprung up around the whales in this protected lagoon; 40 years later, Pachico still takes people out to meet the whales.

We went out four times with a guide from Kujimá. Each time, we were approached multiple times by whales, including a mother seeming to show off her calf. They came right up alongside the boat… popping up an eight foot head out of the water to look at us, diving, flukes rising and gracefully going under water, spouting inches from our faces. Sometimes there would be several right next to the boat, passing underneath, or bringing their huge snouts out of the water right next to us. They seemed to enjoy being touched. I kissed one enormous whale; it seemed silly at first, but as I kissed her, and put my arms around her nose, I had a very strong experience of awe, joy, and love.

Given the human propensity to project ourselves onto the world, it is easy to anthropomorphize their behaviors. We could, for example, spin a story that these whales understood they needed to connect to humans in order to survive. Or, that they learned to forgive and are here to teach us something about living in harmony. Or that they are inviting us to interspecies communication, and thus accelerating our own evolution. Maybe.

Perhaps they simply enjoy a trans-species emotional connection, and, similar to us, are moved by the experience of interacting with an alien life form, and by the discovery of a surprising intimacy that transcends their own species. (“So, how was that for you?”)

Or, perhaps they are simply curious, like us, about another unknown creature that thrives in an adjacent and unknown world and seems to enjoy interaction.

For sure, the whales initiated the initial contact, and are still in charge of the interaction. And, for sure, evolution has always moved forward by experimentation; the creative impulse to reach out, to explore, to try new things. Whatever is going on in this relationship, it seems to benefit both the whales and the humans.

In one sense, it is wonderful to have the opportunity to try to guess what is going on, and why the whales reach out so. We can speculate, and we can form interpretations that are inspiring and that imbue the experience with meaning.

At the same time, efforts to superimpose our interpretation on a phenomenon only reduce it. Like identifying a beautiful bird, doing so provides some reassurance that we are in charge of our world. At the same time, our experience collapses somehow. From an experience of mystery and awe, from pure seeing and pure experiencing, the natural instinct to interpret makes it somehow smaller, more intellectualized, more known.

For me, the experience with the whales was so rich precisely because it is unknowable. This enormous and mysterious creature invited touch, connected somehow. Why, I can’t know. It simply WAS, and I am different as a result. More humble. More grateful. More astonished.