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Blue Whales

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September 15th 2016…
Off the coast of Dana Point, California.
Meeting for the first time, the incredible amazing Blue Whale.
Bigger than any creature that has ever lived on our planet. A Gentle Giant, we are in awe.

The biggest heart in the world is inside the blue whale. It weighs more than seven tons.

It’s as big as a room. It is a room, with four chambers. A child could walk around in it, head high,

bending only to step through the valves. The valves are as big as the swinging doors in a saloon.

This house of a heart drives a creature a hundred feet long. When this creature is born it is twenty

feet long and weighs four tons. It is way bigger than your car. It drinks a hundred gallons

of milk from its mama every day and gains two hundred pounds a day, and when it is seven

or eight years old it endures an unimaginable puberty and then it essentially disappears from

human ken, for next to nothing is known of the mating habits, travel patterns, diet, social life,

language, social structure, diseases, spirituality, wars, stories, despairs, and arts of the blue whale.

There are perhaps ten thousand blue whales in the world, living in every ocean on earth, and of

the largest mammal who ever lived we know nearly nothing. But we know this: the animals

with the largest hearts in the world generally travel in pairs, and their penetrating moaning cries,

their piercing yearning tongue, can be heard underwater for miles and miles.

Mammals and birds have hearts with four chambers. Reptiles and turtles have hearts with

three chambers. Fish have hearts with two chambers. Insects and molluscs have hearts with

one chamber. Worms have hearts with one chamber, although they may have as many as

eleven single-chambered hearts. Unicellular bacteria have no hearts at all; but even they have

fluid eternally in motion, washing from one side of the cell to the other, swirling and whirling.

No living being is without interior liquid motion. We all churn inside.

So much held in a heart in a lifetime. So much held in a heart in a day, an hour, a moment.

We are utterly open with no one, in the end — not mother and father, not wife or husband,

not lover, not child, not friend. We open windows to each but we live alone in the house of

the heart. Perhaps we must. Perhaps we could not bear to be so naked, for fear of a constantly

harrowed heart. When young we think there will come one person who will savour and sustain

us always; when we are older we know this is the dream of a child, that all hearts finally are bruised

and scarred, scored and torn, repaired by time and will, patched by force of character, yet fragile

and rickety forevermore, no matter how ferocious the defence and how many bricks you bring to

the wall. You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as

you possibly can and down it comes in an instant, felled by a woman’s second glance, a child’s

apple breath, the shatter of glass in the road, the words “I have something to tell you,” a cat with a

broken spine dragging itself into the forest to die, the brush of your mother’s papery ancient hand

in the thicket of your hair, the memory of your father’s voice early in the morning echoing from

the kitchen where he is making pancakes for his children.

 


 

Reprinted from The American Scholar, Volume 73, No. 4, Autumn 2004.

Copyright © 2004 by the author.

UMCG interested in virtual swimming – Omrop Fryslân

By In the news
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Woman with an occulus headsetThe hospital UMCG in Groningen shows interest in the Virtual Reality project of the Dolphin Swim Club. They have developed a programme that makes it possible to actually swim with dolphins. The art project also has a scientific impact. Swimming with dolphins is sometimes used as a form of therapy, especially for autism and depression. The content of the Dolphin Swim Club is filmed so realistically, patients feel as if they truly swim with the dolphins and that should have a positive effect on the treatment. The UMGC will investigate the results of the programme over the next two years.

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Marijke Sjollema live in Stockholm – TV4

By In the news
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the Dolphin Swim Club live at TV4

Founder and creative director of the Dolphin Swim Club – Marijke Sjollema – was live at TV4 in Sweden. At the same day as the launch of our first Virtual Reality project, two bottlenose dolphins appeared more or less in front of the headquarters of the Dolphin Swim Club in Sweden. Marijke had the chance to swim with them for over two hours, most probably being the first person ever to swim with wild dolphins in the Baltic Sea.

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She had to swim with the dolphins – Barometern

By In the news
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Man staat op de boeg van een schip en kijkt in zijn virtual reality brilOne of Marijke’s greatest interests is to travel the world and swim with dolphins. On Monday she did just that at the docks in Pataholm (Sweden). Marijke’s voice cannot hide the joy when she tells about Monday’s event.“We’re still a little shocked. It was almost a little magical feeling”, she says. It was last week that she first found out that dolphins were seen outside Pataholm. She and her husband hurried there to take several nice pictures of the carefree dolphins. On Monday, she found out that the dolphins were seen at Pataholm again. “The weather was clear and fine and the dolphins came in the giant jetty. I took the opportunity and jumped into the water”, says Marijke Sjollema.“I think I was with them for an hour. They swam around and I heard their click sound in the water when they communicated.”

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She swam with the dolphins – SVT

By In the news
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Marijke Sjollema was interview by SVT SwedenThe Dolphin Swim Club was mentioned in the Swedish news (SVT). The two male bottlenose dolphins who miraculously appeared in Pataholm off the Swedish coast attracted hundreds of curious people on Tuesday, but few have come as close to them as Marijke Sjollema, founder of the Dolphin Swim Club. Marijke took a swim with the dolphins outside Pataholm in Mönsterås municipality, Sweden. “I have been swimming with wild dolphins around the world but I never thought I could do it at home in the Baltic,” says Marijke.” The only cetaceans that are local to the Baltic Sea are porpoises, and even they are very rare. Besides that, I have spent the summer preparing my art project aiming to film wild dolphins in virtual reality. On the exact date that I pushed the start button for crowdfunding, the two bottlenose dolphins showed up in front of my house…Remarkable, We took it as a sign.”
Language: Swedish

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Flipper the Monkey – Telegraaf

By In the news
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Dolphin SelfiDutch newspaper De Telegraaf reports on swimming with dolphins as a popular tourist attraction. “Swimming with dolphins is a fun activity, but do the animals enjoy it as well? Most people agree that at least wild dolphins can decide to swim away if they are not in the mood to play. But what about so-called dolphin-assisted therapies for children suffering from down syndrome or autism? The Dolphin Swim Club aims to offer an animal-friendly alternative, made possible through a new Virtual Reality technology. The organisation has just launched a fundraiser on Kickstarter.”

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