Smooth Sailing

Having never had a compass, let alone a proper boat with which to navigate the seas of life, I often found myself in maelstroms of madness. Born in the year of the Snake, animal totem the Red Fox, Spring Peeper and American Black Vulture, among others, I am also on the cusp of Virgo and Leo. I have been in multiple psych centers, earned my BA in Psychology, been brainwashed by a cult, conquered a Red-rock Mountain to escape an attacker, slept in corners of N.Y.C. while voluntarily homeless, and taken care of my Grandmother with all the love and care she provided me while I was growing up in her home, where we gathered at her passing.

I fostered an Orangutang twice as a gift, and spent many months homeless in A.Z. and N.Y. before living with my emotional support cat in my new apartment. I am struggling with not drinking, multiple mental diagnosis, and keeping a seven year relationship as well as repairing old ones. These are but molecules that make up who I was and who I am on the journey to become my Authentic Self. I intend to manifest my best life by being happy and grateful for what I have, giving it away, then reaping the rewards of my Truth. But I am also hiding. Hiding from a world that seems so dark and angry, I was afraid to let my light shine. But it needed it now more than ever. I now have many materials to build a new boat. But where to sail?

The morning of my journey, I discovered that the house I grew up and and considered a part of my soul was in a precarious position. Built by distant cousins in the late 1800′s, the house was passed down to the only of her seven children that wanted it. To me, the house was a symbol of unconditional love and safety. A place I was always welcome despite the condition of my boat upon arrival, until my Grandmother passed away. She was my heart. I even had inherited her middle name, Phoebe. I was fortunate to have the care and love of an Elder along with my Mother for twelve steady years. Many elders of various ages, in fact; including my Grandfather and their other six children that came and went with their own children. Except for my aunt Sally who had no children but wanted one very much, so I also had the care of a “third” mother when she was present.

Now, the fate of the house was undetermined. Sally, who lived in the trailer behind the enormous farmhouse had died that last fall. She would also allow me love and refuge without question. When she left, she left many years ago. When my Grandmother died. A part of me did as well. Howeve, Sally was 30 years my elder and had a long history of illness. Twelve years later, she decided to stop trying. A sweet and gentle soul who loved God with all her heart. After hearing the news, I went into nature, as always, for solace. The closest spot was what I called my meadow.

After walking down the road to the meadow, then to the willow that looked upon the creek, something swift and white caught my eye. An Egret or maybe a Great Blue Heron? I love birds, as did my Gramma, and am always trying to identify and learn calls. I would often find feathers from various birds when I found myself on what I felt was the “right” path, and fancied they were from her. Settling myself in to the nestling nook of my spot in the sun, I laughed when I saw a paper boat go upon the current of the creek in front of me. Sally loved teaching simple games like building and sailing a paper boat. We would of course write messages on them. 

This Weeping Willow had always been a place of reflection, prayer, meditation and solace for me; a power spot. It certainly proved correct, and I found myself extremely grateful I had brought it offerings, used the creek to cleanse my crystals and soul, and sometimes just sitting in its nook; feeling safe and comforted. 

Suddenly the crux underneath my legs, between the branch on which I sat and the branch on which I rested my feet, begin to make slight cracking noises. Six years earlier, I found myself walking back from the creek naked, hoping I had cleansed my soul from past transgressions. That was my first trip to the psych center. I had not been there in over a year and did not want to return. So, as the cracking became as loud as a whip, then began to almost roar like thunder, I jumped up, only to look down and see a huge hole with a long, moss covered chute leading into a blackhole. They always say “Go to the light”. But what if you are the light? 

Having gone to a lecture at an Ivy League school to hear a peer of the late Stephen Hawking (who would laugh at that time reference, I believe) speak on black holes and possible portals, I was always under the impression that nature herself may begin to provide those portals. Along with flirting with madness, comes brilliant streaks of truth and the ability to see beyond the layer of this plane of existence. I knew this must be true, as a lady walked by with her dog on leash, both not appearing to see or hear what I was experiencing in the Willow.

As I went to look down the tunnel, I had no choice whether to contemplate if I would enter or not, for I started to slide on soft, verdant moss, a fast and smooth ride to a floor made of grass. No, that was not quite right. It was all grass and I was outside, not in the dark tunnel, but not in the world of the Willow that brought me there. I looked up and straight into the gaze of an adoring but wise fox. 

“We have been waiting for you. I, especially”, I could hear the male timber of a voice in my head, belonging to the magnificent Red Fox before me. 

“Well, let’s go!” I said, in excitement that had suddenly uncoiled itself from the base of my spine; just saying the first thing that popped out of my mouth.

“Not sooo fassssst,” another voice contended. 

I looked down at my feet from which the voice seem to come, and there was a small, green, grass snake that just begged to be picked up so it could coil itself around my little finger. She allowed herself to be handled, but fixed on me a loving but demanding gaze.

“All we need right now issss for you to sssssit. To listen. You have proven in the world above that is actually a world below this one, that you are able to listen. To hear. A different dimension altogether. But underneath is how it appearsss, and ssso it issss. For now”, the snake divulged.

“You femalesss, hissed the fox with a wink, “talk too much even if it is with your mind,” lamented the fox as he rolled around in a role of insufferable agony. “Let me continue, if I may. We have to wrap things up, as it were,”explained the fox as gently as he could. “You are here”, I heard in my mind, “because you have proven a student who will do more good on this plane than the ones on even which many ascended masters still exist on”. You are female, and this is Her time”. He looked signigicantly at the snake with loving eyes. 

“It is because you began to speak to us. You recognized our cries. The factory farms, the oceans of plastics, the destruction of habitat, the killing just for sport. You wept bitterly as you prayed for an answer as to what you alone could do. What the path leads to is a possible outcome of harmony. This does not depend on you alone, though few are chosen, and even fewer speak to us after they listen. We want the humans to know us. To love us like we do them. We don’t understand them and often fear them, but Creator has told us we are all One and so you are the One we choose to represent us. Those without a voice, in your world. We knew it was so, when we heard your one true wish; to be truly healed so you may heal others and allow contentment to replace addiction. You have started with your Reiki. Now you must reach more,” he finished with a wheeze, for he had been speaking rapidly.

“Why me?” I whispered. Then, louder, but not so loud as to startle the fox, the snake, and all the animals that had gathered in this world that was in a constant state of dawn then gloaming. Right now was the gloaming, but it could change at any time. This was based on the “awakenings” of humans, to the true reality, I was told. “I’m insane and have so many addictions,” I hastily and with much embarrassment admitted my most shameful secrets. People don’t like me, much less listen to me,” I protested in vain.

“Dear One,” hissed Snake, “You are not insane. The humans are insane, driven so by the parasites that live within them. While you are of that world, that is not where you are from. We are all from stardust, but you, you came in the pure form of a comet, bursting forth with so much potential you had no idea where to start. You were misunderstood. You self medicated. Human beings are all addicts. Right now, it is their addiction to fear, anger, and apathy that is destroying the homes and lives of all our companions living amongst them on the plane of existence from which you fell. In our World it is represented as a Worm, such as the ones that feed on your tobacco leaves. These parasites are feeding off your kind as they feed upon the tainted dead of our kind. You are a scribe. You will perhaps not be understood by many, or possibly reach millions. This may not be while you are on that plane of existence, but all you have to do is listen and then write. Listen to nature on your plane, in your world, even more than ever before.

We will have our companions answer you in signs and in their language. You will soon find it easier to understand. It is because you are imperfect; the humans will listen to you. Each one wants to be their best self. They just don’t know how. Many have long forgotten their paths. You will remind them the best you can and we will be in your thoughts whenever you whistle your middle name,” the snake finished with a flick of her tail. I noticed she had stopped hissing. She obviously knew we were short on time, for one reason or another, I could not say, but she could.

“I represent the Kundalini, the Shakti, the Light that is meant to flow through all human beings and keep them in balance with the self and their world. It is my job here to nurture the Darkness. For it is also hurt. It did not want to be Dark. It was chosen, and answered, just as you did; unable to hide from those who carried the Light. So remember, as you sail your ship back up, that the Darkness is doing its job, as you are doing yours. While yours is unpleasant, the Darkness has the most unpleasant job of all. Although we are all One, few see the light in the dark. Now go, Dear One. Sail your ship. And know you had to go through the depths of the deep dark to see and then become the light. That was the hardest part. The rest is smooth sailing,”. And so it was.

For I suddenly found myself surrounded by a shaft of light, more violet than the flower. Full of radiant love, truth, and wholeness that brought me back to the awareness of the Willow, and the crux upon which I sat. I saw a flash of red bushy tail with a tip of white on the end vanish around the bend, following the creek where a beaver was busy rebuilding a dam destroyed the previous spring. He worked alone. As I watched, he mixed his building with bouts of rest and play, floating downstream just for fun, then swimming back up, gathering as he swam, climbing up on banks and back to the water with purpose and grace. I realized my work would at first be primarily alone.

I was not a “people person”. I love people, I just found them more disappointing and threatening than I did my animal friends and the elders I sought for advice. Also, the children on the autism spectrum and off, I interacted with in previous jobs; angels in human form.

I knew my writing was what would reach people most effectively. I also believed the power of meditation and personal work would do its work on myself and the animals I wanted to reach out to and comfort through distant healing. I worked on both. I was learned Transcendental Meditation and took Reiki intensives. I worked on gathering information on Contained Animal Feeding Organizations, much of which I already knew and was horrified by. I intended to convey this information along with the water samples near various facilities which cover upstate N.Y., like the feared deer tick that kept so many from even interacting with Nature in a deep level. On Her terms in Her sanctuary. To listen and learn from the animals and their medicine. The writing would show all we take and all that the living animals have to give; in a form that captures the imagination and then conveys information in a legitimate and palatable way. This was to be the beginning of my work. 

To give myself time in nature, to ask her where to begin and to listen to her answer, I decided I would go camping with a pack, sleeping bag, and walk deep into one of N.Y.’s many state forests and partake in a shamanic ceremony involving medicinal mushrooms, which are now used in studies for treatments for depression. A quick and natural way to reset neural pathways. I would build a small, contained fire and let Nature tell me where to best begin my story. I started very early and was at my spot right before daybreak. I partook in my ceremony by the creek that also ran through the meadow, and began to meditate. When a blissful feeling overtook me with such a powerful and fast force, my eyes popped open and I was again in the land of the fox and snake. Although they were not present, I could see the world that I had previously visited. Not a different world, but a different plane of existence. Mushrooms were a shortcut here, I realized. I could also come here in meditation. This was not a different world that required such dramatics as portals, but was a plane of existence at a higher vibration than the one I normally inhabited. 

Nature, in all her glory, was now almost like looking through a kaleidoscope. As my awareness focused on one aspect, such as an oak tree, it broke up into millions of smaller prisms of rainbows, spiraling down into smaller and smaller oak trees that seemed to finally become dots. I stared at the oak tree with abject wonder, and then I looked around. It was like a jungle, this spring morning, as the sun broke over the horizon, with animals and plants dominating my entire universe with a beneficent and glorious presence of color, smells, sounds, and touch, as I felt the life vibration running underneath the bark of the oak tree under which I meditated. An acorn sat at its feet. One of last years, but still in good shape. As I picked up this acorn, I felt the hum of life intensify. I thought about how the acorn, if planted and under the right conditions, would grow into a mighty oak someday. I thought of my Grandmother, and how I always thought of her as a mighty Oak, one that held our family together. 

I wondered how many animals would be left by the time that Oak grew to its full glory. I thought, I don’t know how to end this. But a new beginning, that I could do. I wondered when things went wrong with mankind. I thought about the matriarchal societies in Native American culture. How things were so much more peaceful. How things made so much more sense, where everything and everyone lived their lives purpose to the best of their Truth. I wanted to ask the snake and fox how this could happen, but I wasn’t expecting a Black American Vulture to show up instead. I had raised my eyes to the sky, to take in the view of sunlight streaming through clouds making all sorts of shapes and figures. I saw him hovering and gliding overhead, then swoop lazily around me in circles, ever closer to the ground, until he did a graceful land at me feet.

I had been seeing Vultures for a while now, and they represent such wonder as a totem and are portrayed as such vile creatures for feeding off the dead in our modern culture. This vulture, conveyed to me as I gazed into his wizened eyes, that people were indeed doing what he did.

“Except I do it in the way nature intended. The factory farms, or CAFOs were animals living and dying in fear. Tortured by confinement, forced breeding, no air, no light, living their short and loveless lives; without their children in abject misery. For the consumption of the masses. These weren’t dead animals on the side of the road. These weren’t even animals who had a decent life and were then sacrificed with honor as they were eaten by those who lovingly raised them. No, these animals were Fear itself. And the society that fed upon them like vultures, as they would word it, will now know what it is like to live in Fear without children,” sighed the Vulture as he spoke from his sorrowful eyes, to my mind.

“For they were consuming fear for some time,” he went on. “ These factory farms have been around for almost a half a century. Nature has found a way, as we have conveyed to them as they are captured, in their tiny, lightless cages, filled with parasites feeding on the dead around them. Even in the world of “cage-less” meat, it is one full of death and decay. They go insane, and feed off the dead without ill intent or effort, and are poisoning the minds of those who consume them. This is one of the main reasons the world seems to be falling apart before your eyes. Extrocities like school shootings, climate change deniers, division in homes, communities, countries, people thoughtlessly living their consumer and materialistic lives with out awareness, filling oceans with plastic and pouring inside them whatever will fill the hole that is getting ever bigger. It won’t stop; for that hole can only be filled with self love; not t.v., the drugs, relationships, and all the addictions that keep them in a trance,” he bemoaned.

“They will now wake up in a hurry. Suddenly, fertility rates are going to start to decline. Your race will become extinct after two generations, as both men and women who consume these creatures full of fear and anger become more angry and fall further away from the heart and their own Truths. The anger will cause infertility. The Worm will feed and grow. Fighting and stress will cause miscarriages, men will be unable to perform under such dire emotional and mental conflict. Parasites will cause many to become infertile. Until one day their will be no more human pregnancies by those who consume our caged brothers and sisters,” he wearily continued.

“Yes, many of the animal kingdom may become extinct and the earth will appear to become more at risk before this happens. But know this. We will come back. And the ones who are left that can breed, the ones who did not allow the fear of the animals in the factory farms to enter their mouths; through intention and love, will be able to still create humans. But only for a time. For all that consume the life of another at this point is also consuming the Worm. The parasite that comes from feeding off tainted dead.

This Worm will be the ultimate parasite, infecting every human. But this won’t happen for an undetermined amount of time. First their will be another time, as it were. This will be the time of the Shakti. Then things will go back to a more peaceful and purposeful time. After that, I can see no further. But for now, I believe this information will be enough to help. Some will believe you, most won’t want to. But you will know. The ones who believe will know. With this knowledge, along with hope, it may be enough to save us all. That is the prayer of Mother Earth herself. It would be lonely without humans to love. However, humans must awaken. As in their trance like state they are not coming from a place of love. A culture of Vultures, if I may misquote Neko Bear and the Medicine People,” he lightly chuckled.

“You will join people like him. Then your purpose will expand. You must learn to control your emotions. To be a gentle, yet firm leader. I know you have this in you as generations of strong females on your Mother’s side float before my eyes”, the American Black Vulture concluded with out moving his beak the entire time.

I closed my eyes. I watched my life. Who I started as. Who I became. And who I never lost. The part of me that never changes, but is constant. The comet, if you will. The comet that is in each one of us, that we will merge with at the end. Then, it’s the life you lived that determines what comes next. How hard you tried and succeeded at being a kind, loving being to all those around you, while figuring out and living your life’s purpose. It is a game. It is not a game with an ending, however. Death is just the beginning. The Vulture had taught me that. There may be a time when humans are no longer inhabiting the Earth. I believe then Creator may let Her choose if she wants us to return. I hope we can show her we are worth keeping.

I returned from my trip to the meadow feeling not just refreshed and full of hope, but revitalized in a way I had never felt before. As I drew closer to my apartment, my mind went back to my own personal life. It was Mother’s Day. I was having another painful menses come on, and I felt a fleeting sense of loss, as I had almost passed my child bearing years. The years had flown by, and I had begun to face the fact I would have no child of my own. Like Sally, who loved children and died a Virgin.

I always sent her a card on Mother’s Day, and felt loss at the inability to do so. As I walked in the door, I stopped before entering. At that moment, an amazing red cardinal landed at my feet. Cardinals show up as ancestors and will us to follow our paths. They also show up once a month, for females in other forms. Sally always had the best sense of humor, and my sadness passed. I closed my eyes in gratitude and looked down at the cardinal perched on my bare feet.

“Feeding the birds is really paying off for you,” my neighbor whispered from behind her screen door. I was happy she too, could see this amazing event. Then I went in and began to type. I haven’t stopped until now. Tomorrow my ship will be ready to sail, and it will continue to until its final voyage into the galaxies. But I’m sure that will be smooth sailing, too.