"Eighteen feet of boat on open seas is in almost any circumstance a tenuous alignment. But to suddenly find yourself in that same small vessel above a fleet, 40-foot-long midsea mastodon ...is to know the pure, wonderfully edgeless fear of complete acquiescence. I watched, wide-eyed, the soundless slide of that “moving land,” as Milton once described whales, everywhere beneath our boat, and suddenly felt the whole of myself wanting to go away with her; to hop on for a long ride downward toward some dimly remembered, primordial home...The baby gray glided up to the boat’s edge, and then the whole of his long, hornbill-shaped head was rising up out of the water directly beside me, a huge, ovoid eye slowly opening to take me in. I’d never felt so beheld in my life."

~Charles Siebert

I read this article years ago, and the idea of being beheld has stayed with me. I don't know that beholding is particularly common. I can't remember the last time I gazed at someone with complete wonderment. Love or admiration, yes. Guileless awe and wonder? No clue. Maybe that action, beholding, is where the hope for coexistence lives, because so many people can still feel that way about nature. These leviathans--whales, oceans, mountain peaks, canyons--still can have a hold over us because they are not frenetic. They all seem to be in that slow-motion wave of underwater worldliness--the primordial rhythm that can still silence the soul.