Enter label: Stones kissing souls
Just imagine that you are there – you have healed sufficiently that you can move forward in your life. A vision of an island, maybe St John. And not just for a week, but an indefinite amount of time. Months? Maybe a year? There are schools for little girls. It’s possible. Little girls would learn about turtles, tortoises and terrapins for a little while, and then come back to the world and join the Mathletes. Plus these days you can work from anymore especially on a Metaverse project, the world governed by virtual law.
That’s the vision my mind is stuck on. Not entirely creative or new as a concept, I know, but also, let’s be honest, remains the road less travelled. Now why is that? How is that we humans work this way? Dead souls from generations before us shout this to us in one way or another, go, go, go, but we can only hear it when we are forcibly prostrated in front of our burning bush.
Now, I know nothing about these places, I can just about only point to the Caribbean Sea on a map. I never discussed St John with anyone, or encountered it in a book. In fact it wasn’t even my discovery. The credit goes to Lee. I’ve since joined Facebook groups. I’m learning. I know basically only one fact though—Great snorkeling.
It all started when Lee sent me with a bunch of Zillow links to St John, St Thomas and St Croix, and this picture popped up in when of the listings. I am there, on those cobblestone stairs (to be fair, in the picture it’s brick, but, again, my vision…), trotting down before the sun is too high for a morning dipaddeedooda. I bring the snorkeling mask, and I can smell the rubber on my nose and my teeth grind at the joy of putting in the salty mouth piece. The stones are cold in the morning, and just the sight of them, the touch, draws up the positive ions, draws down the negative ions. I’m a human crystal rolling downward.
I’m no avid snorkeler by any stretch. I have gone perhaps a couple times in my life, but in notable locations, Hawaii and the Great Barrier Reef, where I also Scuba dove until my nose bled. But right now, snorkeling seems like an absolute mecca for recovered people, like I can just imagine people far and wide making their pilgrimage leaving their supplements and prescriptions and appointments on the sand, and meeting 20 yards off shore to point at the Octopus Teacher, a fat colorful fish, a Sea Cucumber, (which I can send photos of to my friend who grows them sustainably).
An aquatic AA of sorts.
And, actually I don’t really care about the snorkeling per se, it’s just an excellent bonus. I take my mask off and I put it around my arm and slither it up to my shoulder. I lie on my back and take a few backstrokes, and then sink into the water, a few flutter kicks on my back, I arch my back and dive backwards, I push water out of my nose, opening my eyes at just the right time. Yes, I’m deft at this made up stroke, the backward butterfly.
Up I go, again on the stone steps, now warmer. Brewed island coffee (do they import?) awaits, of course. What’s the main fruit there? Will I find papayas fresh? Mangos fresh? I’ll be off the carnivore/keto diet that I’m experimenting with for health reasons, right? Wait, this is my dream, so yes! I’m eating fruit by the handful. I don’t even know what I’m grabbing at? Something colorful with black seeds in it. Starfruit? Sweet.
My skin is becoming familiar with the sun so my allergies are reticent, but I’m still careful to look for coverage when its mid morning. What am I reading under a canopy in a wonderfully large hat? I’m reading trash novels. I’m reading Thomas Mann. I’m reading Thích Nhat Hạnh, again, and again. I’m reading Paul Johnson because I always tell my Dad I will finish one of many under advisement. I’m reading about other islands. I’m digging into Metaverse projects.
I’m reading something in Russian, maybe Hebrew again, I’m practicing, I’m showing Lida new languages.
I’m journaling, I’m writing, I’m meditating, I’m good.
I’m blonde, I’m a Swiss banker, I’m a french movie star.
I reminisce about how I achieved recovery every single day, until one day, I simply forget.
Maybe that’s the goal. To come back once I forget. The memory gone, erased by coral, coffee, sunsets. Buried under stones. When I feel so far away from the whole experience that I don’t even need to tell myself, I told you so, I told you that you’d be better anymore! That’s when I know it’s time to come home.
I think about this too. A dream like that isn’t free. You don’t get to simply do this. It’s not just that it’s unaffordable, impractical, incompatible with certain other objectives that you still hold dear, but you just don’t drop your life like that unless a massive schism that you never wanted or asked for (or would even wish on your worst enemy) has occurred.
Realistically speaking, you wouldn’t even have this sort of dream unless you were suffering. Yeah, I think about that. You’d be on your ho hum, fighting with your spouse and family, taking care of kids, annoyed the lines are too long, traffic is bad, or something like that. You’d be going to social events begrudgingly, drinking just to get through the conversation, and the idea of splashing about in St Johns with the lightest most beautiful soul wouldn’t even occur to you. It wouldn’t be interesting.
But really it just wouldn’t occur to you.
It’s a later thing, a maybe thing, a never thing, it’s a thing for bums, it’s a think for lazy people, or broken people, or whatever.
So a massive debt must be paid to get into the world in which this dream is seen for what it actually is. A true pound of flesh is what that kind of dream requires, to make it yours, not something you condescend or push off. And it’s not just because its inconvenient. But it simply exists in another realm. It’s the multiverse dream.
People don’t drop life like that, unless that life has valleyed and journeyed through something unimaginable, only then does it appear like a well in a desert, through a black hole of sorts. (Although shit analogy I guess, mathematically I’m pretty sure the multiverses can never intersect).
Yes, pittances are required, dues must be made. In any scenario, when people go on mere vacations, they need to save up, get coverage at work, nannies, they need to set time aside, they many need to plan it during a job change or the culmination of a big project (a successful one too), they will need to coordinate with their spouses, they will need to set all kinds of things up. And thats just if they go for a few days or weeks. Imagine something longer. It’s not just about savings, planning, but a extraction, some kind of Mossad level extradition.
So ladies and gents, I guess all this is just a strategy to reframe an intolerable experience as the dues to be paid, a daily deposit into a savings account, to achieve this vision, to even care about this dream in the first place, to even have it at all. Right? I convince myself for just a few minutes a day that I’m going, I’m swimming, and my soles are kissed by stones. And, if I’ve learned anything, a few minute daydream is the bloody mother of a real solid future foundation.