The Doldrums

Just Do It

Photo by Maria Teneva on Unsplash

Hello Readers,

I’ve had a terrible time getting to my computer this week. I’m still moving back and forth across the island, riding the fire currents from Pele’s domain to swim in the blue whale roads of Kealakekua. Right now I’m writing to you form the lanai at Paliuli Farm where I’ve been helping out with the Air BnB rentals while I look for a place to live on this more expensive and exclusive side. The search in this housing market has been extremely disheartening. I’m telling you all this because it’s literally the only way I can begin writing. I am just too low in spirits and I thought if I just started typing and trusting my hands they would tell me what to do-body memory is body wisdom.

What happens when society overrides body wisdom? If you live in modern society you see the results of this all around you. Strip malls and cookie cutter condos, moped wrecks, drunken brawls. Those are just a few examples on my radar. I’m sure you have your own. My body wants to live near Kealakekua Bay. To be known by it. And you know what? The bay wants to be known by me, too. We are in a relationship and I keep asking the bay to find me a home close by so we can deepen our intimacy. The concept of developing an intimate relationship to a place may seem strange to you, but in my life I have been far more intimate with places than with people. This could be a survival strategy resulting from trauma or it could be my destiny. I don’t know. All I know is that relationships with particular places have been the deepest for me. Others may be haunted by lost loves. I’m haunted by Crescent Beach and Black Rock and Laguna Bacalar. I suspect it’s why I was born. I am called to create beauty both as an offering to those places and as a service to humanity that could help us correct the distortions that have caused us to create civilizations that are so out of balance we, the creators, will most likely extinguish ourselves along with millions of other life forms-tree people, creepy crawlers, wind riders, song birds, insect clouds. Call me crazy- (It’s been done. Still hurts, but I’m getting better at handling it. Thick skin? No. More tenderness for others)- but moving into a condo feels like moving into a jail cell.

Still, it’s not. And even if I was in an actual jail cell, I would still have the choice to live free in my mind. I’m not doing that. I’m letting the external circumstances of not having enough money for a decent place close to my beloved bay (or even a decent place kind of close), and having to work very hard physically for the money I earn get to me. I feel like a failure.

Where do these feelings come from? Although external circumstances around me do not support my dreams coming true, in the present moment nobody is telling me they couldn’t. My feelings come from the past-my direct experience and conditioning in this life, and the programming from my ancestors who left Europe and had to make it in “The New World,” after suffering who knows what repressions, rapes, plagues, and wars. Who said my future has to look like my past? Is that a cosmic law? No.

But there is something else at work in me, some vague fear that manifests as a restlessness, a never feeling at home that I have played out literally again and again in my attempt to break this cycle. I’ve probably moved 100 times in my 54 years. Seriously, sometimes on Block Island I would move three times in one year. There never seems to be a place for me.

I want a home, one that doesn’t feel like settling. One where I can do my work of making offering to the songbirds at dawn and carrying their feathers at dusk to stone altars I make under thickets where the deer sleep and roam. A home where I make beauty.

When I lived in inns for years I moved from room to room, from basement to barn. Everyone accepted this as normal due to our economic situation on a seasonal tourist island, but I think it points to something much deeper. Economic systems are the outward reflection of our collective beliefs. We choose them. We create them. We can participate or not. Sometimes that results in living in the bushes in Puna and washing at the county water pump, sometimes that results in becoming an artist who never sold his vision out and makes millions of dollars. What is the difference?

Attitude I suppose. The artist wants to be in conversation with the collective, the guy in the bushes does not. These are assumptions of course, but hopefully they are useful examples of how attitude-one’s projected thoughts and emotions-can either help or hinder an individual to find her own way through the delusion of victimhood that governs our collective. This is true sovereignty. It doesn’t mean there won't be compromises or that the whole world will change for the better and all your dreams will come true. True sovereignty means making the necessary choices to stay in the body. Sometimes that means you will have to make choices that bring you back into it, which is often grueling and painful, and can make you unpopular, or outright rejected by society, including your own friends and family.

Here we are at the end of something that could also be a beginning. Once again, my hands have come through. Some of the dread has lifted. I have little notion what they’ve written in the past hour. I’ll have to go back and read this. It’s interesting to think they have all these ideas contained within them. Maybe all we need to know about ourselves is encoded with symbolic wisdom like petroglyphs on our hands. If so, mine say, “Just do it!”

Last week I shared a poem with you, “Unfolded by the Waters are the Faces of the Flowers,” and asked you to share with me in the comments or privately what the poem meant to you. As I am so late in getting this to you, I am going to follow up last week’s letter in another post this week and end this one here. If you still want to comment please read last week’s post and get back to me soon so I can include your response in that letter. Here’s a link:

Unfolded by the Waters are the Faces of the Flowers

Thanks for bearing with me. I hope you found something valuable to your own human journey in this. I look forward to sharing more with you about the mysterious poem from last week in a couple of days.

Kō aloha la ea

Concentrate on love by way of the light

Jen