What's fish got to do with us?
According to some African/Diasporic/Indigenous creation stories and Western science, A LOT.
Some African Diasporic traditions, like Orisha-based practices, believe that Yemọja, a primordial water deity, is the mother of all.
Some West African creation stories like that of the Dogon believe that we humans come from fish-like extraterrestrial beings that descend from the Sirius B star.
Some Western scientists believe that fish are the ancestors of our ancestors.
As it stands, we have many connections to our swimming kin.
Morphology is concerned with the form and shape of things. The morphology of fish can teach us a lot about how and where a fish makes a living. Fish with “superior” mouth positioning (mouths that point upward) tend to ambush their prey from below. Superior-mouthed fish dwell near the water’s surface as their target is often on or near it.
Flat-bodied, bottom-oriented fish, like flounder, tend to be wide with eyes that exist only on one side of their bodies. The flatness of their body is a reflection of compression/pressure found in deep water. That same flatness allows flounder to lie on the sandy bottom, both camouflaging itself from predators and being able to scoop out food sources for itself.
Like fish, our bodies are diverse and exist within a necessary ecosystem of hundreds of exchanges, small miracles, and mundanities that keep the world as we know it going. If we were all the same, if we all looked the same, if we all did the same things, the world would halt.
How unnatural is it that humans have a colonized understanding of existence and beauty, making many of us aspire to the same shape? Whether it is thinness, lightness, able-bodiedness, or cis-ness, us all being the same would not only mean the death of ourselves but the death of the world as we humans know it.
We are meant to be different.
Our bodily differences are not burdens. They are a practice of the diversity of life.
Although fish are way more genetically diverse than humans, fish variation teaches us that there is a place for ALL of how we are rendered in differences and similarities.
Fish bodies also teach us that as niche varies, so does body shape. How we make a living, the small exchanges and compromises we make to keep on existing and surviving, the things that our ancestors did to exist and survive, all those things manifested into our very existence at this very moment.
We all have different duties and jobs in different parts of the world, some specific and some not so specific, some native and some endemic (so hyperlocal that it can only exist in one place). How you exist right now, different from others and different from how you were in the past and will be in the future, in particular to your purpose, your place, and your work in this world.
How you will look in the future and how you have looked in the past has a specificity that is interlinked with each of the four moments of the sun concerning time, space, work, and destiny.
Now, with fish, because their bodies determine so much of what they do (and don't do), where they can live, where they can survive, and places where they cannot stay, they have a sort of body literacy about themselves. Fish tend to avoid things that are metabolically overpriced and metabolically expensive. They tend not to engage with something that runs up too much of their energetic stores.
When has it paid off for a fish to do TOO much?
Fish teaches us that we have to be body literate. Being body literate means being spiritually literate, mentally literate, physically literate, environmentally literate, and emotionally literate enough to know what is metabolically overpriced for how you exist right now.
What would take too much?
What would take away from the everyday functions with their baseline for what they need energetically?
There are so many parts of our bodies that have a baseline, a metabolic, energetic baseline.
Did you know that the brain is the most metabolically expensive organ in our bodies? Before you do something, think about what your brain needs, what your spirit needs, what your heart needs, what your “higher self/spiritual head” needs, what your belly needs, what your feet need, what your hands need, what your eyes need, etc.
Think about the baseline of your existence,
And think about what you spend your energy on, is it worth it? Does, or will it, ensure your survival and your line going forward?
If you do a thing, will what you're left with be worth it?
Fish can teach us about what's sustainable and what's not.
Fish can teach us a lot.
If you got this far, bravo!
If you're looking for reading suggestions, look into anything about fish morphology, it's fascinating! Or be like me and take on a Master Naturalist program and have to take a whole class on fish anatomy and morphology, lol.
Other recommendations:
🐟The Ultra Black fish by Victoria Bulley
🐳 Undrowned by Alexis Pauline Gumbs.