Alexis Pauline Gumbs

Do I cherish my wildness more than I fear their rejection?

The poem of the Indus river dolphin is the ongoing sound of here, a sonic consciousness of what surrounds them, a form of reflective presence. Here.

Here we are, where presence meets offering, looking to Indus river dolphins who live by constantly using sound to mark where they are

Marine mammal mentorship offers us the chance for presence as celebration, as survival and its excess, as more than we even know how to love about ourselves and each other.

Breathing in unbreathable circumstances is what we do every day in the chokehold of racial gendered ableist capitalism.

their breathing is not separate from the breathing of the ocean, their breathing is not separate from the sharp exhale of hunted whales, their kindred also.

Are you still breathing? This is an offering towards our evolution, towards the possibility that instead of continuing the trajectory of slavery, entrapment, separation, and domination and making our atmosphere unbreathable, we might instead practice another way to breathe. I don’t know what that will look like, but I do know that our marine mammal kindred are amazing at not drowning. So I call on them as teachers, mentors, guides.

where I was in relation, how the sound bouncing off me in relationship to the structures and environments that surround me locates me in a constantly shifting relationship to you, whoever you are by now.

Listening is not only about the normative ability to hear, it is a transformative and revolutionary resource that requires quieting down and tuning in.

How can we listen across species, across extinction, across harm? How does echolocation, the practice many marine mammals use to navigate the world through bouncing sounds, change our understandings of “vision” and visionary action?