Play with dolphins

I'd worked and worked and worked and worked here and my back got really messed up and I, I really needed some therapy. And so I started swimming long distances, swimming, a few miles along the coast. Then I discovered the dolphins. I was sleeping on the beach. I'd get up a couple hours before sunrise and do yoga. And then it was a two mile hike. If I went along the road to where the dolphins were it's about a four mile hike. If I went around the edge of the lava flow and then you become around and there'd be the Bay and you could see if the dolphins were in there.

And it was like an amazing thing. I mean, basically to be able to live in this beach and go swim with the dolphins every day in America. So these guys are swimming and I'm watching and I'm on the bottom, and I see for sure there is one bigger than all the other ones. And then I realized that if he moves his head, everybody moves. He moves his head that way everybody moves. He speeds up, everybody speeds up. And I'm swimming with this and I'm watching that. So I just, without thinking about it automatically, just get into responding to what he is doing. And so I accidentally put myself totally in his control. And so for half an hour, an hour, he just had control of me.

And then all of a sudden, they're on the bottom. He comes up off the bottom and accelerates coming straight at me and he leads the whole pod. And a few minutes later, they're below me and he's lined them all up shoulder to shoulder, in a line with me right in the center. So I figured that was sort of my initiation into the pod that I was, you just do what the head man says and you're okay, you know? That was the rule. In their motions it's very, very, very mathematical, very geometric. They're always moving and they move in a way to include you. And you realize how harsh it is to be around people. You know, some people with their body language include you, but every place you are, people are excluding you with their body language without not even being conscious of it.

They're just incredibly polite. My conceptualization was I look in our human minds and it looks like half of the emotions are adaptions to scarcity. You know, this is my land, this is my food, this is my car This is my money, my woman. But these guys don't have that. They're they're hunting on these schools have millions of fish. Their problem is the tiger shark. And the adaption to the tiger shark for these guys, because they're not big enough to defend themselves alone is being in that pod. And since they can only sleep half the brain, they're in that pod 24/7. If you're not a good social being, you're going to get thrown out of the pod and you're going to die. So they've had millions of years to their adaptions for survival. It's politeness.

If you learn a few tricks, then you're more fun to play with. So they would come and swim around you in a circle. And I had these hand paddles on, so I'd crawl on my side and I'd go like this like crazy. So one could put its head right in front of me and then spin me like a top. And then just to make it more interesting, they'd get you spinning good, and then all of a sudden they would try to change the axis and make you spin at a different angle, which was really, really fun. but the only problem was that these guys can jump up in the air and do a dozen spins and come down. You know, that's what they're good at. That's why they're called, "spinners." But you know, you spin around a few dozen times like this and you start to throw up. So I had thrown up a couple of times and there was this one time where I had just got to the point where I was going to throw up and I thought, "I'm not going to do it again." Nope. And all of a sudden, waaam....! Like this. And okay, And Woah! Here he comes again. Argh! Okay. And I let him get ahead of me, and I went over the tail. So now what's happened is we're changing the game. So now he changed the game and what he changed the game to was I was swimming overhand and hard. He put his tail right in front of my head and sort of swishing back and forth through my, through my hands. And so he's got all his buddies, the other juveniles and they were watching this. And so they come in and start body-slamming him on the side. to just throw his rhythm off. So all of a sudden I gota half dozen dolphins. So that became the game I played with them. I did that like hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of times. That was the most fun thing I've ever done in my whole life. That was just incredible. It's just too much fun to be able to stop. That's just what happened, you know, it was

I didn't support myself. I was just there. How much money would it take to be able to spend five years going every day swimming with the dolphins? You know, most people, they can afford a week in Hawaii and maybe they're lucky if they get a day swimming with the dolphins. To be able to go for five years every day and swim with the dolphins? That's karma. You can't... No amount of money can afford that. And you just have to have your freedom. There was one day I was in the bay and that day the dolphins were super friendly. They started swimming out of the bay and it's like three and a half miles around to the next place where you can get out of the water. They started swimming out of the bay. And so I stopped and they were continuing and they turned around and came back to get me with it. So I, some of the ways... I stopped again, they came back to get me again and I didn't go. I was already pretty tired. And then they came a third time and then I stopped and then they didn't come back. And it turned out that the people from all along the coast were saying that different pods kept coming together. They went along the whole coast until there were, you know, a thousand, a couple thousand dolphins, and then they headed off. There was some massive party, something going on and they'd invited me and I could have gone with them. And it was this exquisitely beautiful day. Of course you wouldn't have survived. But still I've always regretted it that I didn't go. It would have been so special.