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Running Fox Papers November 2002 ~ Vacation and Spirituality
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These words
have been received by Jakob Lorber (1800 - 1864) as divine revelation
of the inner word. Voorwoord While reading their stories, you only can reach the conclusion that the incidences they write about, would not have happened while at home. Read and enjoy these two beautiful stories. In a next issue I intent to share my own vacation memories with you. Hans
Inside
Out
August 2000 I packed up everything I needed to live inside the camper of my Nissan pickup and drove to British Columbia. My sister friend, Freedom, lived there. I was in-between jobs and planned to travel for about a month. I’d never experienced that exhilaration in the freedom of taking off from home with no set return date. To help fund the trip I had been trying to sell an automobile, but it wasn’t happening yet. Friends offered to run some ads and forward the money when it sold. Yippy skippy, I was truly free to travel! The textures of Lemurian lands began to resonate through my Colorado soul as I drove up the coast of Oregon, Washington, and then ferried over to Vancouver Island. What began as a vacation would soon transform into a spiritual test of the highest order. I made friends with the wealthy as well as the simple. I talked with 800 year old trees, met a new native sister friend named Rose, experienced a Rainbow gathering on Sand Cut beach and drummed with abandon until the sun rose. Freedom and I traveled to the west coast of Van Couver island and walked a five mile beach one end to the other barefoot in the rain, then walked back. Another time we hid inside a cave found at a roadside lake within sight of a faraway mountain that looked like a laughing Buddha. Two ravens arrived in the trees above and spoke in tones we didn’t know were possible. Once they discovered we were there, they changed their voices back to the normal crows and caws. Yes indeed, ravens are magic. Another time we hid inside a thicket of bushes at a park in Victoria and sang and chanted songs of Love and Light while passersby wondered where the melodies came from. Would I have dared to do that in my own neighborhood? Highly unlikely. Yet when no one knows you it becomes easier to consistently act from inside out. This became the theme of my experience to come. Three weeks into the trip I was running low on funds but not ready to return home. The car still wasn’t selling. Rose suggested I work at the carnival Labor Day weekend during the Saanitch fair. It was the 104th annual fair, and she said the carnies regularly hired people just for the weekend. I got a job running the “Moonwalk” kiddy ride. A large inflatable dome where small children climb inside and bounce to their hearts content. I made $400 cash for three days work. Surely soon my car would sell and I could linger here longer, if I was frugal. I spent $25 and bought two weeks worth of groceries. Peanut butter can go a long way when you want it to. Freedom and I had to part ways for a few days due to her employment, so I decided to drive to a beach and camp by myself. The campsite was ½ mile from the parking lot. Returning for the second and final load of necessities, and my purse which I’d stashed behind the seat, I discovered someone had broken into the truck and stolen all my money. A silent panic rose within, threatening to consume me. I stifled it, gathered my backpack and returned to camp. I did not fear the bears, or the mountain lion that left tracks in the sand at night around the tent. I feared how I would get home. 1200 miles is a long journey, requiring several tanks of fuel let alone feeding oneself. I had food for two weeks and enough gas for 100 miles. I felt surprisingly calm. An inner fortitude was blooming inside that I would not yet fully tap. For two days I lived with silence and prayer and sand fleas and tides and stone. I decided it was time to return home. I would borrow money and make my way back. Simple as that. I returned to Victoria and called Freedom. The message on her cell phone revealed she’d found a new job on a nearby island, Salt Spring. I phoned her there. She’d found the home and job of her dreams, and I could live there as long as I wanted. It was tempting. Surely I could at least go visit and perhaps work my way home? Surely the car would sell soon and all my worries would vanish? She connected me to a friend who loaned the ferry money to Salt Spring, and therein began the true nature of this vacation. At this juncture I was clearly aware how easy it would be to call someone and borrow money and return home. But something was ringing inside me. Something that wanted to test the fibers of my being and see if I had what it took to come from absolutely nothing to something. There was nothing that required me to be home just yet, and if I could easily escape the situation, why not try to deal with it first? I look back now and still cannot clearly define what it is that made me decide to stay and tough it out, but it would end up being the best decision I ever made. I found volunteer work at a wildlife refuge center. I’d shown the director my ‘Bluebird Makes A Choice’ story, and so I was free to try my hand at healing as well. Each morning I chopped vegetables into eagle size, crow size, and small bird size bits. I hand fed fish to baby seals and drank in the love from their eyes. I washed cages and dishes and laundry. And I talked to the owl that had been resident for six weeks. We knew she was well, but she wouldn’t fly. She told me she didn’t like the smell of the eagles in the flight pen. I told her all she had to do was show us she could fly and she would be free. She was released two days later. Maybe this was why I stayed. The car still wasn’t selling back home. I cooked dinner for a couple for pay, leaving tasty morsels warming in their oven and disappearing just before they arrived home because her husband wasn’t fond of Americans and she didn’t want me to be seen. She told me how grateful she was to be able to come home and feel the love and care set before her table each night after a long days work. Maybe this is why I stayed. I met a man who was traveling from Washington on his sailboat. I got to sail that small boat around the islands, handling the mast and maneuvering through the force of the wind. I’d never felt the power of the wind in my fingertips before. Maybe this is why I stayed. I helped an elderly woman with dusting and yard work. A retired psychologist, she’d suffered severe burns and disability from a house fire several years prior. I understood when she shared how her grandfather spoke to her from the other side, and we talked about spiritual beliefs and alternative healing methods. Maybe this is why I stayed. I felt what it is like to be an American in Canada. Loved and hated. Not legally able to work unless under the table. I did readings at a metaphysical bookstore, and once sold homemade chocolate chip cookies on the corner of our street. Now THAT was profitable. I would dream often with the baby seals I hand fed at the center, and once I got to help release a group of them back into the wilds. Maybe this is why I stayed. And one afternoon I sat on a beach on Salt Spring Island and listened to an ant that had crawled upon my hand. He reminded me of the ‘Global Love’ experience earlier that summer. I wrote that story on Salt Spring, as well as three other meditations. I visited a shelter for street people and listened to their pain. I met homeless people and talked with them, now having a better understanding of what it truly is to be homeless. I got groceries from a food bank and experienced what gratitude and giving really are. And once someone we didn’t know came to the house and left three grocery bags full of groceries for us. I’d never been on the receiving end of such giving, although I had been the giver many times. That full circle feeling was something I needed to experience. Maybe this is why I stayed. I met people who claimed to be spiritual but only sought to manipulate others, and I met people who were innocently wide open and claimed nothing. I could bake, clean, garden, write, paint, give readings, cleanup animal pens and talk to the animals. I came face-to-face with my basic skills. If I’d had a rent-free place to stay I probably could have managed to come home on my own. But now it was November. I was existing well enough but not making headway financially. ‘In Gesprek met de vier seizoenen’ was close to being published and I couldn’t finish it from here. I dreamed one night of Colorado, and saw within the soils of the earth that this was a place of my roots. There lay a power for me to untap, and it was time to go home. I made a phone call, had money wired to my bank account, and packed my belongings. Just before leaving a friend I’d met in Victoria asked me to take care of his wolf dog. Santos and I had bonded from the very first meeting. He awoke my wolf heart born years earlier from my previous wolf companions. Craig was to travel to India and couldn’t go unless Santos had a loving caretaker, as well as someone he loved. Would I take him? Oh, YES! THIS was the gift I received because I had stayed. I returned home ready to fully live inside out, with a wolf companion by my side to help keep my heart open. I began working with developmentally disabled adults, finished ‘In gesprek,’ and began taking groceries to friends I knew that were in need. This vacation changed my whole being. I learned the importance of remaining true to spiritual principles, yet in a grounded way that was truly useful to others. Looking back, would I really have stranded myself again like that? Looking back, I wish I had done it years earlier. And the funds from
that car that would have changed everything? I finally managed to sell
it for $50.
Full
of expectations The two of us are sitting on a terrace in the middle of the fashionable town of Mytilini, capital of the Greek Island of Lesbos. It is late. The sun is setting and my plane will be leaving soon. This seems unreal. Conversation is reliable. His humour is full of confidence. His smile gives me so much peace. I am not going, or so it seems. But the sun goes down. The plane is waiting. He pays for the two cups of ice tea and drives me to the crowded airport. He arranges a nice seat and hugs me for the last time. Full of expectations, my heart is pounding...would I ever see him again? But it is just that expectation, I know, that I have to let go. Beyond expectation, beyond hope, that is the only road back home. And I am waiting on the airport. Am waiting for a full two hours for the taxi to drive me home! And in my home, at home, everywhere, I am waiting. Sometimes pausing is going on. Right? It has been almost two years ago since I used to have a bond with this man. We were crazy about each other, heavenly in love. He abandoned home and hearth for me, as I did for him. I lived in Greece for three months. He came to the Netherlands for nine weeks. We had been living apart together, we made love and quarrelled and made up again. Together we did not manage, but it went so very well for a time that I always will say that I won’t make any judgement about this. I refuse to put the blame on someone else. Because after all, isn’t every irritation in someone else, in effect, a shadow of yourself that you are not prepared to acknowledge or else part of yourself that you would like to possess but not able to reach eventually? With him it was his independence, his reticence, his unbelievable bordering self-confidence. Wow, would I like to possess those qualities! To for once not be dependent upon the opinion of someone else, or to be waiting for the validation of someone else. No more turning and twisting to make everyone happy. No more lies for ones own good. No more gossiping with the girls about everybody’s conquests. And above all, better still, about the last disposals. And yet, somehow, I did not succeed then. I thought I was in need of other people to make myself happy. It only felt good when I was with others. And still, all these people made me very unhappy. That’s why I quit. I choose for myself, I thought. Drawing the lucky number? I went my own way and became completely independent. Became tight-lipped and yet emanated a huge self-confidence. I joined societies, clubs, and started music lessons and full time work. And I got fed up. All that I performed, I noticed, was in order to not get bored stiff. I was full of activity to kill the time. Not wanting to be alone. To not get the feeling that I didn’t have a home, a family. I only had a few friends. But loose acquaintances, of them there were a lot. And wow, hadn’t I made it! I became so very independent that I even couldn’t find anybody to go on vacation with this year. Until the Z in my agenda I phoned every relationship, but every single one of them had other plans, or didn’t feel like going. Literally I sat there with my hands in my blond hair, as the saying goes. I didn’t know what to do. Then three weeks before departure I got a phone call from a friend from the island of Lesbos in Greece. Nowadays she is a reservation manager at a local booking agency and had found a very small house on the heath for me. It was an ideal spot to play the clarinet for hours (my other big love), to enjoy the setting of the sun, and it was close to the beach and only a half hour walk from the beloved town of Molivos. A needle in a Greece haystack and for next to nothing! Because I believe in heavenly course-plotting, and coincidence doesn’t exist, just give it a name, I thought to have drawn my lucky number. To be alone in the middle of nature and to know that people you love are close by meant freedom, independence and satisfaction combined with loving people in a holiday package. It was all about finding the right balance in your life, isn’t it? So I quickly bought a ticket and daringly I asked him to fetch me from the airport. For four weeks I found myself in another world. Full of highlights and all-time lows. It was a time in which I had yet to learn another lesson. I knew this lesson already, but to know is something else than to recognize, to employ. It was the lesson of expectation. What do I expect from other people? Do I really expect that they can make me happy? Do I really expect that everybody else is alerted the moment some small little Caroline comes hopping by? So very bigheaded! So very condemning! How lonely life is going to be then. But how would life look if you are able to live beyond that expectation? Or, to go even further, even beyond hope? Release is more than the discharge of material things. Releasing is also to let go of expectation and the hope for it. Fetch the day Day by day it became clearer. What is independence if you live it out of loneliness? But then, what is independence when you feel good treading your own small way of life? How intense are you able to enjoy a white Lymnos wine on your ‘own’ sidewalk café with an owner who slips kilos of tomatoes and aubergines? And then the sweltering heat that slowly gives away its warmth to the horizon in the west? And even then realising that your searching fellow human being does not hit upon his diversion in crowded bars in the village. That the one relationship often starts even before the previous one is ended, that a human being just talks about the hardship of someone else to forget his own grief. That the factual taking of distance bridges impregnable kilometres, but particularly, you would never focus upon things you do not own, but instead on that which is already yours. I do not ‘have’ this friend any more, but I do have his friendship. I do not ‘have’ this one to one relationship any more, but I do have the closeness with many, out of freedom. There is no need any more to being entertained. I enjoy myself when others are glad, when I hear their stories and see their happy faces. I am not in need of the grief of others. It is allowed, but no more necessary. Sorrow is only an expression of loneliness, which is pushed away at the moment that it is being told to you, through which a little bit of satisfaction is able to mute the tears. And I become more silent even more. Every day more satisfied. Enjoying the little things of life, like a grasshopper sitting deathly quiet for hours on my evening terrace. What would he have to tell? Or of two red-brown foxes that are flashing in the night traversing the street right in front of my feet. I am frightened, but someone assures me later that foxes surely do not like blond Dutch girls. Or of a breakfast brought unexpectedly by a friend. Do I feel harassed that my hair is not yet done? Of one – no two – bottles of wine, drank together with a girlfriend on the nightly beach. The later the evening, the deeper we looked into our glasses and into our souls! Of an intense sad story of life, told by an unforeseen passer-by. What a gift of trust! And of the last afternoon on a terrace with two cups of ice-tea in the fashionable town of Mytilini… four weeks in another world. Four weeks in which I was to learn that it is only in the details of everyday life you will be able to discover the true greatness of the cosmos above. How simple our life can be. Full of expectations my heart is beating. What will today bring? But even more important: what will this same day have in store for you? Fetch it. Enjoy it. Carpe Diem! Reactions?
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