Midnight Sky

Mid-July, after dark. On the hike up to my hut, the brightest night sky object I'd ever seen caught my eye. Brighter than Venus. Brighter than Sirius. Could be Jupiter, but why did it look so huge? I pulled out my star tracker and saw it was not just Jupiter. It was Jupiter and Saturn nearly aligned, creating what looked like one massive glowing orb to the naked eye. And for the first time on this island, the dark, moonless night so clear I could see a faint, dusty brush of the Milk Way band stretching across the sky.

Not too many days later, the night sky still clear, I crossed the island on the single two lane road that cuts through the jungle hills. No lights near the peak, only stillness. My eyes locked in wonder. As above, so below. The axiom, an ancient echo, a whisper of truth. I continued down the winding road to a beach on the far northeast side of the island. One of the few remote beaches accessible by road. Faint, unrecognizable music drifted from one of the seaside cafes. A few dim lamps lit the beach. Empty and dark. And much like those nights I spent on that beach at northern tip of Borneo staring into the darkness above me, the world fell away. 

From here, nothing remains except the motion of stars across the night sky. Suspended in timelessness, tapped out and tuned in. I want to stay here forever, but I can't. 

Daylight breaks and I'm back in the world again. I maintain my practices and diligently stay focused on my work. The urgency to anchor and focus lets me know something is happening. To be here on this small tropical island, away from the intense energy and general madness of the world, is not something to be squandered. I write. I make progress. I breathe. I take steps in the right direction. 

Connect with the cosmos and anchor down. As above, so below. To stay vast and light in a heavy world is the only way I can exist--it's the only way I can write and connect and know. Uncertainty may reign (as it always has), but at least I have a compass. 

My posts are few and far between these days, and that's okay. I know this phase won't last forever. More adventures are on the horizon, but for now, it's a season for anchoring and focusing. 

What does as above, so below mean to you? Do you ever connect with the cosmos and anchor it to earth? If so, how has it served you? 

Untethered

Sitting on the beach waiting for my friend to return home, I'm hit with the sudden urge to start walking across the sand. The tide so low it feels like I'm crossing a barren desert. A post-apocalyptic world full of sand, abandoned huts, unnecessary bridges, and no people at all. Until I see him--a man hobbling over a bridge, cane in one hand, a small backpack slung over his shoulder, wearing nothing but a speedo. On the other side of the bridge, he makes his way toward the distant water and plops onto the beach, arms and legs stretched out, face to the sun. What a strange planet, I think.

Back at my friend's hut, we make smoothies and eat cake. This place brings me too much peace, she says. I've stopped thriving. What a conundrum. Like a zen koan. My mind can't figure out what to do with it. I've strived to create peace in my life for as long as I can remember. And once I had it, I wasn't letting it go. But was it causing me to become lazy, to not thrive, to perhaps even block things from my life? A wave of panic rises then fades to dark.

The next day I swing by Grace's house to say hi. I accidentally stabbed myself in the leg, she says and shows me the wound. Out of control art project, she explains and shrugs. We exchange stories of scars and accidents and the angels who helped us. And all I can think about are scars that can't be seen and invisible angels.

My phone pings. A friend stuck in another part of Thailand has sent me a picture. He's shaved his hair into a mohawk and tie-dyed it rainbow. Cabin Fever, the caption says. Stay wild moon child, I respond. Three weeks later he calls me from an airplane. I'm leaving Thailand. How do you feel about that? I ask. Bad, he says. I get the strange feeling people are going to start losing it very soon. Or they already have, but I've not been seeing it that way.

I social distance from social media, attend close knit improv sessions, and meet with friends to talk and write. The thing about Koh Phangan, someone says one night, is that no one asks questions. Leaving too much room for assumptions, I think. As intriguing as it is dangerous, I can't shake the thought for days.

Life on a nearly deserted tropical island in the strange year of 2020. I attempt to ground into it as much as possible. But the harder I try, the more untethered I become, unbound and tumbling into the ether. I grasp at fleeting moments as they slip away, leaving me longing for solid connection and questioning their purpose and lessons.

I call my friend in California at 3am. I'm losing it, I tell her. She sighs. She's been putting up with me for lifetimes. I'm supposed to be in Vietnam. Roadtrip around Ha Giang and Sapa. Head south, explore, research, open portals. I start to ramble. And....she says. I tell her more. And...she says again. She doesn't stop until I purge every last thought and confession. Then she fills all the empty space with wisdom. I'm taking a picture, she finally says. My eyes are bloodshot, I tell her. No way, your eyes are oceans. Yeah, oceans of blood.

Late night drives across the island through the jungle, starry skies above me, a quiet darkness surrounding me. I find my way to the beach--no people, hardly any lights, an empty tree swing, fireflies. Surreal. The lightness I've been missing. Freeing and impermanent. Releasing the questions, embracing the mysteries. Untethered and tumbling into the night.

How are you staying grounded these days...or are you untethered and tumbling? What's keeping you thriving? What's keeping you at peace? What fills your days and nights and all the spaces between? 

Collapsing Timelines and Other Curious Phenomena

"The sun was shining on the sea, shining with all his might....and this was odd, because it was the middle of the night." ~Lewis Carroll

Not too long ago my friend Maura called asking me to meet her at a tucked away stretch of beach on the north shore of the island. "The timelines are collapsing," she said. "Bring cake."

Bare feet in the sand, we walked the long, empty stretch of Mae Haad toward Koh Ma--a sometimes island, sometimes peninsula depending on how high or low the tide is. On that particular day, at that particular hour the tide was so low we could walk all the way to the small island.

From across the sandbar, the overgrown, dense jungle didn't seem penetrable. But as we approached, a rocky path appeared that lead us along the edge of long ago abandoned jungle huts etched into a hillside. Dilapidated, graffitied, abandoned huts choked by vines and smothered by dead fallen palm fronds.

Eyes wide and drinking in the surroundings, we were two children loose on a deserted, tropical island having adventures, traipsing through the jungle to find treasures. The only things missing were our khakis, fedoras, and bullwhips. All my childhood dreams come true.

We poked around the remnants of what looked to have been a reception area or maybe a swim up bar--which was odd because at low tide the ocean waters didn't come anywhere near the structure. Shattered porcelain and coconut husks lay at our feet, and through crumbled concrete, small vines and flowers emerged. Energetically magical and ominous, light and dark, alive and dead. The longer we lingered the stranger it got. Probable timeline, Maura whispered. A chill ran up my spine. I glanced back over my shoulder to make sure the path was still there.

Our conversation meandered around esoteric theories and blurred realities, but it always lead back to the collapsing timelines. Amidst a global phenomenon, people are not just having different experiences--they are experiencing different realities, conflicting ones. Each reality existing in a surreal bubble that doesn't just brush against the others, but spills over into them, tangled and contradictory, creating a strange friction--like a bad Sci-Fi story with too many plot lines going at once.

In other words, our everyday observational world slipped from one of classical physics to quantum mechanics--a world based on uncertainty, fluidity, and probability. Everything is and isn't all at once. All potential possibilities slipping in and out of each other, each as true as they are untrue. A surreal perspective outside of time and space. The implications chilling and exciting.

Heading back toward Mae Haad, I stopped as we passed the eerily, empty hillside of huts and listened. When confronted with what no longer exists, collapsing timelines, and splintered realities, you can't simply listen with only your five senses. Everything becomes an extension of you. Feel into that. Soak up the stories. Imagination stems from where we put our attention, after all. 

As we made our way back across the sandbar and the long, empty stretch of Mae Haad, a storm brewed in the distance. Dark clouds hung over the sea. We paused and watched in awe as the storm moved across the gulf, over the scattering of fishing boats, barreling toward us, charging the atmosphere with surrealism and electricity.

Lifetimes of factors set our souls in motion to put us exactly where we are meant to be at this time and place, to align with a specific timeline, to have specific experiences. Move with awareness and caution through this wilderness. What are you exposing yourself to these days? How are you reacting to your environment, to all the input? What timeline are you gravitating toward?

Life in Strange Times

"A little knowledge withheld is a great advantage one should store for future use....It is a game of secrets in which one must show and never tell." ~Amy Tan

I fall into a deep fever dream on a Wednesday morning. The kind with restless images, indecipherable codes. Somehow, by late afternoon, I'm completely recovered. My teacher here on the island invites me to a private resort for yoga class, dinner, and sauna detox. My last night of normal.

The fever returns and it lasts for days. I sleep and sleep and sleep. Oddly, around the same time each evening, I lapse into a moment of clarity and energy, just long enough for daily Sadhana. I move my body and gently raise my energy. Pranayama, mantra, meditation. Powerful techniques that existed long before humanity. I've carried them through lifetimes. Like second nature. Even sickness cowers away.

And each night, I crawl back into bed where the fever dreams live. I don't eat for three days. On the second day, I wake with a craving for a spicy chicken noodle soup from an Asian restaurant over 8000 miles away. Nothing else will do. So I ponder the irony and go back to sleep.

I dream I'm falling through realms. The seer back in Chiang Mai had told me to be careful of this. That I had a bad habit of slipping. Pay attention, he warned. I awake in this reality, on a tropical island, in a hut in the jungle. Everything is so quiet at certain times of the day. Years before I moved here, I told a past life regression therapist about this vision: I'm lying on my back and staring up at palm trees. No one can find me. My safe place. Perhaps there's a connection. How do I know what's real?

Early morning drive to the Thong Sala Pier. Fresh air in my face, I almost forget where I'm going and just want to drive and drive and drive. Then I remember. I need to get to Koh Samui to extend my visa. I sit on the upper deck of the ferry, close my eyes, and let the cool morning wind remind me I'm alive. This is real.

I've never seen the immigration office so crowded. It's never taken so long. Sweat drips down my back. I'm so hungry I might pass out. After an hour, I step into the small air conditioned office. My retired friend, the one who lives down the hill and across the road from me, beach front, calls to lament. I'd rather be on the island than anywhere else in the world, I say. You're right, he says after a pause. We really are fortunate.

Over a week later and I'm fully recovered. And in some mysterious twist of luck, I'm sleeping better than I have my entire life. Long deep sleeps where I wake well rested and light. Where have you been my whole life? I say to sleep. Sleep doesn't answer.

I catch up on Gigi Young videos. She speaks a truth no one wants to hear. I digest her messages and stare at the stars from my hammock. How did I get hooked on this channel again? Oh yeah, research on those bouts of sleep paralysis and thrashing I use to have as a kid that lasted well into college. But that's another story.

Days pass and I binge watch Sky Life and make a list of all the experiments I want to do on my body and mind that I've not yet tried. Some of them will have to wait. Others I start immediately. How is it that my body and mind seem to always know what they need? Like a memory trigger set long before I was born, they just know what to do and when.

The world has slipped into strange times. Some places far worse than others. Some call it upended. Some call it an awakening. Some people are going mad. Some are dealing with life just fine. Some people are being productive and experimental. Some sit with anxiety and fear of the unknown. And all the extremes and everything in-between. Ignore anyone who tells you that you're doing it wrong or that you are in denial. We are not all meant to have the same experience.

Throughout my unconventional childhood and life thereafter, I've gained this ability to adapt to the insane, to process life and emotions at an alarming efficiency that leaves me feeling suspicious. Like secrets whispered through thin veils that aren't really for me. Like a forbidden blessing I shouldn't question. I fall to my knees in gratitude. When I look up, all I see are palm trees.

Days tick on. Sadhana, reading, editing, walks in the jungle, swims in the ocean. Surprise calls from friends. I sit on the beach and watch the sun dip below the horizon, spreading colors and rays of light. I snap a picture. An illusion of stillness. The rhythms of the earth never stop. Effortless and magical. It whispers its secrets all around us, always. But who is paying attention? Stop, it says. Be present. Tap into the infinite. Eyes wide open. All the secrets you've ever wanted to know are right here.

Where is your mind these days? What is your experience in these strange times? Are you paying attention? What secrets are revealed when you stop and tap into the infinite? 

Caught in a Timeless Dreamscape

We were somewhere near the peak of the pass when the sky turned from a cloudless, electric blue to an ominous gray full of storm clouds. No one seemed to notice or care so we trucked onward over the jagged slabs of slick rock jutting from the ground. At the top, we stopped to catch our breath.

I had not anticipated the hike to Bottle Beach on the far northern reaches of the island to be a vertical scramble over a rocky mountain with storm clouds looming. When the path narrowed and vanished beneath the boulders, our fearless leader bounded ahead. I think this is the way, he enthusiastically shouted over his shoulder. Koh Phagnan is not a big island, but I'd still rather not get lost in its thick tangled jungles where no roads go and no clear hiking paths exist.

Near the end of our decent to the bay we began to hear the waves crashing hard on the shore. Gray waves crashing, no boats in sight, the beach nearly deserted--this was not normal, especially for high season. As we made our way down the beach heading for shelter, our fearless leader and a few others stripped their clothes and ran straight into the stormy waters.

I stood ankle deep trying not to get knocked down and watched the storm move steadily across the ocean toward the island. Something about the energy of a storm. A sensation of lifting out of time and space. Deja Vu. Caught in a timeless dreamscape.

Throughout my high school and college days in Ohio, I made countless trips to Folly Island off the coast of Charleston, South Carolina. I'd sit on the beach amongst the sand dunes and tall grasses and watch storms roll over the water. Once the rain hit land, I'd run back into the stilted house where I'd sit on the porch, the house swaying in the strong wind, the thunder and lightning palpable. Fueled by the electrical charge from the atmosphere, I began to write stories here. Timeless dreams in stormy capsules.

During my first summer in Yellowstone National Park, my hiking buddy and I got caught in a thunderstorm storm hiking down from the peak of Mount Holmes, a 20 mile (32 km) hike round trip--only for the intrepid explorer, perhaps hinging on insane. Howling and laughing our way down the switchbacks, over the river, and across the fields, back in West Yellowstone by dark. Soaked, we ate so much pizza we nearly popped, never-minding all the stares. The entire experience deeply singed into by being, so surreal it feels like a dream.

California storms were rare, perhaps a reflection of the storm trapped inside me, the storms that came in other forms. Standing on the cold cliffs of Davenport, the sky dark, the waters rough, but no thunder would sound, no lightning would strike, no rain would fall. Wrapped in a flannel jacket and warm blanket, I walked down the stone stairs carved in the cliff side and waited for things that never came.

A picture of a storm hung on my walls over time and places--a storm and a lighthouse shining over the stormy waters, out into the dark sky. I surrounded the picture with glow in the dark stars so when I'd turn off the lights, the lighthouse light looked like a comet streaking through the night sky. By day, it was a storm. After dark, it became the cosmos.

I still have that picture, tucked in a box, somewhere, Santa Fe, New Mexico. But here I am now, standing on the northern edge of an island, somewhere in the Gulf of Thailand, letting stories and memories and the energy of a storm move through me.

No boats were heading back to Chaloklum so we decided to wait out the storm and hike back. I sipped on my coconut coffee and the rain blew sideways. I kicked off my shoes and talked about storms and storytelling, pulling timeless stories and memories from timeless places into the present. Caught in a storm, in a dreamscape, tumbling toward a destiny that I've already written. Because from this timeless perspective I already have.

Do you thrive in the energy of storms or hide from them? Tell me your storm stories--whether real or metaphorical! 

On Lightness and Grace

"Slow down everyone you're moving too fast, frames can't catch you when you're moving like that." ~Jack Johnson

With each passing moment, I sink deeper into the slow life here in the south of Laos. So slow that everything suspends in time, like a photograph, like a never ending ellipsis....

Life is still, but water flows through everything. The Mekong and the waterfalls. Etheric and dreamy, an effortless magic.

The bold swim under the waterfall letting its power crash over them. Small children splash about the shallow shoreline. I lie on the floating platform at the edge of the small lagoon, and the sound and vibrations from the waterfall move through me. I buzz and tingle. Nothing feels real anymore.

From the road, frames rush past. I cross bridges and when there aren't bridges, my bike and I float across the Mekong by raft.

With each breath, I float out of time and space, and with each exhale, I ground back down. But back into a slightly altered reality.

In Savannakhet I stand face to face with powers that could change the course of everything. Being denied a visa is not part of my plan. I breath through the initial denial and connect with my own source of power. Through calm words, I get out of my own way and allow space for the miracle to come through. When I pick up my visa the next day, the sensation of lightness lifts me out of time once again.

I float on to Si Phan Don, the 4000 islands in the Mekong that separate Laos from Cambodia. Dirt roads, aged river huts, rickety bicycles bumble by--as though I've stepped back in time 30 years. Not much changes here. The islands float above the rest of the world where they can't be touched.  Don Det, at the river's edge, I sink my toes into the sand. From a distant cafe, music drifts through the palms and out over the river. You can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave.

My last few days in Laos an anticipation bubbles up from the pit of my stomach. Obtaining a visa is one thing. Actually crossing the border is quite another. Again, at the mercy of the person who stands between me and the place I've called home for so long.

We cross the border late in the day. The thud of the stamp, the smile of the officer, my hands uncontrollably shaking. I walked out of the building and into Thailand. I nearly burst into tears of happiness. Stepping out of one reality and into another. The lightness, the relief, the faith, and the grace.

There will be moments when all you practice and believe will be put to the test. And when the moment of grace comes and the miracle has transpired, you will know why you walk the path you do.

Tell me about moments of grace you have experienced. What did it illuminate for you? 

Sweet Starts and the Joy of Writing

After spending the last few hours of the decade chanting ancient mantras in a candle lit room packed full of devotees, seekers, and probably a few folks wondering how they ended up thrown into the mix, I came home, curled up in my hammock, and watched fireworks explode across the cloud covered skies of Koh Phangan.

Welcome 2020.

My first day of the year was full of beach, sunshine, and a new Murakami book, then meeting up with friends for yoga class, sauna detox, and the most delicious dinner I've had on the island yet. And to end the night, I had an almond latte which sent me reeling. I was up until almost 3am. Why do I do these things to myself?

I ended up logging onto an old online journal I kept the entire 12 years I lived in Santa Cruz. Twelve years worth of memories. Twelve years of a life that feels like it was lived by someone else...or several different someones. Some entries made me tear up, some made me laugh out loud, some I gasped in shock because I couldn't believe such insanity.

And if you count all the paper journals that came prior to Santa Cruz, that's a lot of  writing. I had some sort of a mad drive to document that I was alive and living life as best I could. And in a way, I suppose I still do. A life not so much filled by progress in the conventional sense, but by experiences and stories. Those suspended moments in time that I write about for the sheer joy of it.

The next morning I awoke to the sweetest email from an old friend I hadn't heard from in quite some time--thanking me for my amazing blog posts and inspiration, for somehow having a thought or answer to things he'd been pondering. We never really know the impact we have on other people, for better or worse.

An incredibly sweet start to a new year, caffeinated into the early hours and all.

Wherever my curiosities and questions lead me this year, I hope they continue guiding me to the heart of mystery--brushing against the mystical and colliding with all strangeness of a Murakami novel (in the best kind of way). And as I continue to experience life and write, maybe more folks out there will get hit with the magic and inspiration from it too.

Take note of all the ways you feel inspired this year. Keep following that thread of magic. It might lead you to the most unexpected places and people. And you might end up inspiring others along the way too.