Sinking Into the Serendipitous Slouch of the Island

The other day as I was rinsing my dinner dishes in the sea I found myself hunting treasures (something I can’t help but do when in close proximity to the jigsaw motif of the rocky shore).  As I was gathering broken shells, calloused crab claws, and polished stones I began finding quarters, dimes, and nickels.  They kept coming and coming, their silver glinting playfully in the setting sun.  It was slightly surreal, I had found an endless supply of true modern day treasure, and suddenly it dawned on me: this has happened before.  I had a dream about ten years ago that I was treasure hunting on a magical island when I began finding dimes and quarters.  And now that dream was being materialized.  In the dream I felt as if the coins symbolized abundance and prosperity. I hoped it was the same in this waking dream, and decided maybe I would read the colorful shore like the I-ching.  Whatever I found on a particular day telling my fortune, in this case, literal fortune coming to me.

A few nights later I decided to sleep on my favorite grassy knoll.  I braved the no-tent insect barrage to experience sleeping without a cloak of trees between me and the sky.  That night I left behind banal dreams and was given a vision.  The buzzing of the mosquitoes rang like prophetic gossip in my ears.  In this dream, it was shown, after an extended waiting period, that I was the teacher we had all been waiting for (we all being all the different aspects of myself).  This role as teacher was heralded and confirmed by a bald eagle.  One dream character was attached to comfort and eating yams and peanuts.  But I enthusiastically informed him of the synchronistic news: that was my teaching—that comfort and the base survival aspects of life are just as profound as the more lofty “spiritual” notions.  I was waking everyone out of their sleep, taking them out of their comfort, to inform them that comfort was included—divine domesticity.  The totality, the circle, high and low, nothing being excluded from the perfection that is.  That morning I awoke to a bald eagle swooping down ten feet above me, the first bald eagle I had seen this trip on the Island.

The Commodification of Being

I came up to Orcas Island with goals in mind: heal, write, gain clarity on my path and mission, apply for grants, visualize, create, etc, only to be met with large amounts of emptiness, moments where all I could do is sit and stare at the sea.  This may be thought of as a positive thing, a natural fall into meditation, a stilling of my mind, a resting.  But what I observed in these moments was a subterranean agitation, a concept that I should be “doing” something, accomplishing one of the myriad of goals I brought like luggage.   I also noticed that when I did just allow myself to do nothing that I had to somehow commodify it as “something,” be it “meditation” “rest” “Zen practice.”  I couldn’t just let these moments be spartan as they were.  And they were quite unadorned.  I had no clarity about my path, no sparks of inspiration, no rushes of revelation, my mind was clear and expansive.

     I finally surrendered to this organic quietness, I admitted the internal resistance and I succumbed.  Interestingly, once I did poetry arose.  Sparse and elegant: fish leaping like skipping stones across a glass ocean.

   The first days of being here, my body and being collapsed into a lethargic stupor.  I couldn’t believe it as I never tire, but here I was feeling as if I could sleep all day, feeling as if my muscles were cold syrup, my heart a swollen stone.  This tiredness was transient, and transformed into the soft stillness that I am describing, and now as I allow this bareness to be, I feel flickers of creativity begin to lick the crevices of my mind.

     A lesson was powerfully given to me at the Rainbow gathering.  It was a lesson of trust.  Trust my intuition, trust the perfection of where I am and what is happening, ultimately I developed a deeper trust in all of life and the divine mathematics of all that is occurring.  I was given the opportunity to apply this lesson up here.  And a lesson is not a true lesson unless it is challenged, the challenge usually coming from within (there is actually no within or without, see Einstein’s theories).  These challenges arise like tricksters, begging to be believed.  And in the integration of the lesson in face of the challenge, comes a deepening of the lesson and true wisdom.  So as I felt exhausted when I expected to feel energized, and as I felt empty when I expected to feel inspired, I was able to apply this lesson of trust, compassionately and consciously embracing what is, despite what I think it should be.  And then as I embrace, things transform, walls are collapsed, resistance melted, caverns of my soul discovered.

     Now when I can only sit and stare at the ocean, my emptiness feels full, welcome, perfect.

To Drive or Not to Drive?

June 17, 2011, my first bog entry.  As of now, no one is following my blog so I am in my own clandestine cybercave.  I created this blog on the coattails of being a “loser,” i.e. runner up for a writing award at school.  After the awards ceremony with the ridiculously uninspiring keynote speech on rhetoric and St. Paul the apostle, I ran to the bathroom to escape the congratulations and croissants.  In the foyer of the ladies room, in front of the full-length wall-long mirror, I encountered the proud winner of not one, but two awards.  She was tall and gangly, a perfectly awkward recipient of English department accolades.  I, juxtaposed next to her, medium height, blonde and Californianesqe.  She brushed by me, awards in hand.  “Congratulations,” I forced through my self-deprecation.  Flushed pink with the afterglow of winnasm, she modestly thanked me and replied, “How ostentatious of me, carrying my awards like a trophy.” I laughed, inwardly noting that winners of writing awards use words like ostentatious in random restroom interactions.

     The next day a superhero surge of loser energy drove me to invent a one-woman theatrical production, write an essay on jogging as an anthropological excursion, and to create this blog.   I didn’t know how long the losing tsunami would last, but I decided to surf it till its murky and flooded end.  It died down the next day, but hey, I got this blog out of it. 

     So here I am now, weeks later, with another year of college behind me and the infinite potential of summer in front of me.  My relationship of six and a half years has ended, and I decided, given my newfound freedom and the difficulty of finding affordable housing that I would travel for the summer.  My plan was to find a cheap car and run it to the ground.  So I proceeded amidst the chaos of moving to look for a vehicle. 

     Ok, so here it is, I am impulsive, I live by whit and whim.  So it goes with buying a car.  First one up, a 94’ Dodge Caravan. The ex and I drive all the way out to Boring, OR to take a look-see.  After taking the clunker out for a spin, I agree to buy it, talking the seller down from $1000 to $700.  The van has issues. Any euphemism about my “buyer’s savvy” dissipated as I drove the chugging, wet-dog-wreaking, gas-guzzling van down highway.  My stomach sank with the weight of my mistake.  The next day, after further inspection, I realized the van was infested from ceiling to floor with mold, some of it ominously black.  I just wasted $700 on a piece of moldy metal.  I decided to try to sell it and to my chagrin, when the first potential buyers arrived the car would not even start, not a revving peep.  So I looked into my options and after using my best legal jargon talked the seller into a full refund, which was an amazing relief and blessing. 

     The moral of this scenario is that I don’t want to drive.  It is not as simple as getting from A to B, or the idyllic freedom of the open-road that car commercials propagate.   It is a doorway into another universe, a universe that I do not want to inhabit.  While driving we miss a myriad of everyday miracles. Covered in a metal shield we easily collapse into an internal bubble reinforcing the delusion that Einstein so eloquently pointed out: the false belief that we are individual organisms, separate from the whole. 

Poignancies I miss when I drive:

• A Victorian atmosphere—cool and delicate as the dawn.  In the fragile attics of NW Portland it rocks in wooden repose, it arches flamboyant through springtime awakenings, gilded with the pale pink of the April Cherry. 
• The subtle sweep of autumn.  Leaves tangling with knotted roots—the sun gloating in isolation.
• Zipping on my bike through the Springwater Corridor trail, Portland’s bike freeway, i.e. heaven
• Winter’s lethargy hiding corners of delight.  Colors whisper rather than shout.  Branches take precedence.  One can see without the fancy adornment of leaves that trees blush naked in a variety of hues.  Mustard dogwood, fuchsia apple, mauve maple, crackling colors across a slate sky.
• The Willamette, bloated with mountain perspiration, meandering brown and placid.
• The nooks and crannies where the gentle nuance of nature meets the outrage and ingenuity of humanity: broken asphalt with the patient press of the dandelion sprouting through.
• The potent promise of lavender, its dry scent wafting arid through wet murk.
• Chimes tingling against my vertebrae.
• January’s leftover Christmas ornaments strewn like nostalgic litter
• That light! shattered across the river, sharpening my vision, illuminating the seagulls, glinting off the silver raised platform of the Hawthorne Bridge, touching each angular sail of each nautical vessel down in the harbor below, tricking me into elation.

I have chosen not to delve into the atrocities of driving and its cancerous effect on the planet. I don't want to succumb to a cliche binary exhortation on the evils of the road.  I am not staunchly opposed to driving, but at this time in my life I prefer not to drive.  I prefer a more dynamic way of life, one where I engage the path, not just the destination.