Cetacean: Hector's Dolphin

[RonPrice]

PROVIDENTIAL CONFIRMATIONS

A six part BBC TV Series Wild Down Under, first shown in 2003, was screened in Australia in February 2008. When I got up at 3 a.m. due to irregular sleeping patterns caused by my bipolar disorder, I chanced upon a middle-of-the-night viewing of episode 3: The Southern Seas.1 Isolated from the rest of the world for a staggering 45 million years, Australia and the wild southern seas have seen the evolution of an awe-inspiring array of strange, surprising and often deadly wildlife. I won?t go into detail but the following prose-poem focuses on one sub-species of dolphin known as Hector?s Dolphin. This mammal inhabits parts of the continental shelf near the shoreline off the west and east coasts of New Zealand?s South Island. I photocopied four pages of information about this smallest of the dolphin family and will not reproduce those details here. ?They have a total lifestyle package right at their door,? said the voice-over and ?hardship has brought out the best in this mammal.? These final words of the program made me ponder as I headed for bed at 4 a.m. ?Ron Price with thanks to ABC TV, ?The Southern Seas,? 2:55 a.m. to 3:50 a.m., 14/3/?08.

We all get lifestyle packages
and lifestyle packages and, yes,
hardship can bring out the best
and the worst in us all?or it can
bring out a dogged determination
with little to no glamour at all-no
fame, no claim, no rank?renown,
just that quiet plodding along from
day to day with the lifestyle that
circumstances have yielded: indeed
this is that with profiteth thee, if
therewith thou doest content thyself.

Purity, independence and freedom1
...all in that order and so it is that
my lifestyle package can only yield
so much contentment and, along with
Hector?s Dolphin, I will swim in my
offshoot of the Antarctic Circumpolar
Current in the Great Southern Ocean
with that measure of contentment and
freedom which I have earned or which
an unmerited grace has granted me in
these first years of a late adulthood in
these darkest hours in the history of
civilization when the first streaks of
a promised dawn were penetrating my
life with providential confirmations.

1 Baha?u?llah

Ron Price
24 March 2008