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.