Nowhere to go, Nothing to do... - #34

...except learn to listen and be still

A quick word of welcome to new readers and subscribers, and big welcome back to those who have already been on this journey with me. If you are new and want to get oriented to how I got to this point in 1996 soon after my 40th birthday, you can subscribe for free and you will get an email with all my previous posts in order. New ones will come by email as well. I also turned on paid subscriptions, which I treat as a kind of a matching grant program. For each paid subscription on my site, I subscribe to another writer on Substack to support this community of independent voices.

And now for a not particularly amusing or amazing story - but nevertheless the story of one of the central formative times of my life. May I remind younger readers (and maybe all of us!) that in 1996 we did not have smart phones. Internet and access to my AOL email account were via dial-up through land lines so I rarely checked. There were no apps or websites to locate B&Bs in coastal and mountain areas. To find places to stay, I would arrive in an interesting town and look for a rack card or a flyer on a bulletin board or a stack of business cards by the cashier at a cafe or health food store. I would stay until I “heard” it was time to move on - or until the next guests displaced me. And so for about 10 weeks I bobbed around Northern California like a rubber ducky in the eddies of a stream.

The rodents who more than a decade later consumed or made bedding out of years of journals kept from my teens on, somehow spared my 1992 journey to Tibet, and the journal covering this portion of 1996. There is an inscription hidden on the back page reminding me the 4” x 6” hardcover blank book with an image of sun and stars on the cover was given to me by Steve Diamond, one of the participants in the Costa Rica Peace 2000 meeting, in gratitude for a short stay in my St Lukes Place apartment right before I returned to Durango. The entries begin with documenting my first essential oil reading with Marlies on June 25th, but I wrote nothing else about my stay in Durango or the travel to the west coast. When it picks up on July 15th I am already at Mount Shasta, where I briefly reconnected with Marlies and Prageet before continuing south on my own.

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Prageetʻs given name was Pete. He had come to the United States from his native England via India, in the company of the mystic, philosopher, teacher, some would say cult leader, known as Rajneesh or Osho. Oshoʻs teachings threaded through the Stargate worldview, and among the few possessions with which I left Durango in the Pathfinder was a newly purchased deck of Osho Zen Tarot cards.

There was no room to stay at Shasta. I followed my intuition down to Weaverville near the Trinity Wilderness area. And there I pulled cards and laid them out according to a tarot card reading pattern to answer the question of what the heck I was supposed to be doing. I first wrote my own thoughts responding to the images on the cards, and then went through the accompanying book to record the “official” meanings. My notes read like this:

The issue: Mind (reversed). The confusion in my mind becoming painful. I need to stop thinking.

Clarifying card: Thunderbolt (reversed). Lightning beams of consciousness. Human selves falling, no physical sense of security.

Unconscious influences: Clinging to the Past self-explanatory

Old Patterns: Stress. Monkey about to burst balloon under my feet while I furiously juggle balls in the air.

The picture of what I needed to move beyond was absolutely clear.

The Outcome card was called Schizophrenia. Ouch. The image shows a figure with hands on one ledge and feet on the other. In between THE GAP. Rather than being terrified by this image, for the first time I felt reassured that I was doing exactly what I was meant to be doing. It was the opposite of the terror I felt on my January road trip, when even with a fixed destination and timetable I panicked at the thought of not having each nightʻs room booked ahead. What I noticed were the two birds hovering above the human figure and the soft clouds below. What was in the gap looked peaceful. It felt like it was time to let go of my “schizophrenia,” of trying to cling to the past for security while opening my mind and senses to a new way of being.

The trick was that I could not simply jump to one side or the other from my present precarious position. I would have to let go of both sides at once and free fall, trusting that like a character in one of Paulo Coelhoʻs books I had been thrust onto a journey that would eventually take me where I needed to land. Keep listening to my heart, following the omens, practicing what I had been taught, and trust that each day I would know what to do with that day, when to move on, when to be still. Do this until the monkey mind stopped and the inner stillness became a durable, accessible, trustworthy guide. That - not some physical destination - was where the journey should end.

Of course, thatʻs not what I told my concerned parents when they called offering to fly out to San Francisco to help me find my way back to reality. What I told them was also true. I was more relaxed than I had been since graduating from high school. I was staying in beautiful places, eating delicious healthy food, hiking, napping, reading a book a day - even novels! I reassured them that I had the financial resources to take this time off before I came back to that “reality”. Maybe they could think of it as a practice retirement. I must have sounded sane enough as after that they at least pretended to accept there was value in my travels.

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What I did not do on the journey was “journal” in the conventional sense, documenting my daily thoughts and feelings and experiences. I would copy a sentence out of a book, or note synchronicities, or observe how the books I bought at local bookstores randomly tied together, or that an image mentioned in a book was in the room where I happened to be reading. Many entries read like haiku…

Trinidad

Wild beautiful Pacific Coastline

Giant Redwood Trees

Or code…

Pop. 432

Shadow Lodge Room 5

As the weeks go on I travel from Humboldt County through Mendocino into Sonoma. More tarot cards pulled, more forests hiked, more books read.

Arriving in the town of Elk on July 25th after 10 days of travel, I wrote I was “guided to a serene, perfect spot, perhaps the most perfect B&B room I ever stayed in. Tonightʻs room looks out on the cliffs, the seas, the gardens below leading to a hot tub. As I soak in the hot tub listening to the waves crash below, I finally allow a sense of knowingness to replace my leap of faith.” On August 8th I pulled the card Maturity. “He can move in any direction -within and without - it makes no difference as his joy and maturity cannot be diminished by externals. He has come to a time of centeredness and expansiveness. The white glow around his figure is his protection and his light.”

Eventually I turned inland for supplies and settled into a regular kind of motel room across from a strip mall in Larkspur, where I would stay for weeks, eating takeout from restaurants across the street without once getting into my car. I wrote a poem.

ABUNDANCE

At first I thought

It must be a rule.

Even if I hadnʻt opened

The second bar

Of French-milled deodorant soap individually wrapped

(Still using the first slender wafer)

A third would appear

And a fourth.

Shampoo too.

And the instant coffee packets

That I never touch

Preferring my own golden filter

That fits snuggly over the mug

Drakes Bay Blend aromatic inside.

But then I noticed the third mug

And more towels than

A gaggle of teenaged girls at the beach

Would use in a week.

They were love notes

Tender tokens from

An overworked maid

Thanks for the kindness of a smile

A meeting of the eyes

A recognition of the woman

Inside the cleaning machine.

I still make coffee with the golden filter and drink from the mugs I bought along the way.

It was not until August 22nd, after 5 weeks of solo travel, that I finally wrote pages and pages of what people usually write in journals, trying to work something out on paper. Things I Know and Things I Donʻt was what I titled these pages. Velvalee and Joié were pushing me to come to Hawaiʻi to be there for “Velvaleeʻs demonstration.” Something big was about to occur, and according to the Guide that Joié channels, I had to be there for it. The pressure seemed like a contradiction, I wrote. It just did not feel right that my progress had to be accelerated or my process cut short around someone elseʻs schedule, not even Velvaleeʻs. After all, they were the ones who had been mentoring me in how to listen to my own inner guidance.

What I did know was that my inner guidance told me I was still in the right place, doing what I needed to be doing. What did I not know was also a short list. When I would get back to New York, why my landlord never cashed my July rent check, whether I would go to Hawaiʻi or when.

I also knew the time had come to get out of a populated area. I meditated and pictured a place in the mountains looking more like an artist studio than a cabin. That took me to the ShangriLa B&B near Mariposa. And thus the journal concludes with me just outside of Yosemite on September 9th, followed by fifteen blank pages. Stillness.

I stayed until the late September air took on a chill I could not shake. It was finally time to fly to Hawaiʻi.