The Sparrow Hawks of Aruba

Posted on June 25, 2010 by Trish and Rob

Aruba’s desert is a desolate place, filled with all the stuff you expect to find in deserts – cactuses, arid land, mysterious culverts that hold water, plants that have adapted to the lack of water, and critters that call the desert home.

One evening, we were sitting on the cottage porch reading when, suddenly, in my peripheral vision, I saw what looked like a small hawk hovering just above the fence of the house next door. But it looked too small to be a hawk and by the time I stood for a closer look, it had flown off and alighted on a cactus on the other side of the road.

The next day, we drove to some of the tourist spots – a donkey rescue farm, a place called Casibari where gigantic stones (origin unknown) create a mysterious park, and an ostrich farm. The farm has 28 ostriches that are like pets for the people who own the place. They supposedly aren’t killed for their meat or oil, but are primarily a tourist attraction. While we were sitting there, a young woman held a bird on her arm. It was a sparrow hawk, chewing away at a piece of ostrich meat.I realized this was the species of bird I had seen that night on the porch.

Megan asked if she could hold it and the bird climbed onto her hand, the bit of meat still in its claws. Rob and I both petted it and the sparrow hawk didn’t flinch or try to bite us.

“Is it a pet?” I asked.

“No, not really,” the young woman said. “It just likes people.” She flashed a quick smile. “And it likes the meat.”

After awhile, the sparrow hawk flew off. It obviously wasn’t a pet in the traditional sense. But the young woman said it would return at dusk, for another piece of meat.  What I found curious about this encounter is that the sparrow hawk reflects the people of Aruba.

In esoteric terms, the hawk symbolizes the search for a higher truth and broader perspective, the sparrow is about creativity. Starting in 1953, the island began to sculpt its image as a tourist destination. It capitalized on its strengths – fantastic beaches, the intriguing desert geography, and its location in the Caribbean, a spot outside the hurricane belt. Over the years, the idea of Aruba as “one happy island” took root in the collective consciousness of its people. As one local gentleman put it, “The island is too small to hold grudges.”

Aruba covers 70 square miles, is about 20 miles long and and six miles wide. Four languages are taught in schools – Dutch, English, Spanish, and a local dialect, Papiamento. But Chinese is also spoken here. Most of the supermarkets are owned and run by the Chinese.

There are luxury resorts – the Marriot, the Hyatt – but there are also smaller, family-owned places like the Boardwalk and the North Shore Cottage where we stayed. These places cater to windsurfers, kite boarders, sun worshippers, and tourists seeking respite, fun, and the silence that only deserts and exquisite beaches can provide. Here, you can parasail, skydive, go tubing, horseback ride through the desert and along the beaches. Or you can float in the swimming pool of one of the luxury hotels and sip Margaritas until dawn. You name the activity, someone will provide it.

The people of Aruba are as adaptable and independent as that sparrow hawk that perched on Megan’s hand, allowed us to pet it, photograph it, and then flew off into the afternoon light, following the lure of the wild, its bit of meat still clutched in its claws.
– Trish

This post is a bit lighter than the oil one. Yet, one darker note: The people of Aruba are also worried about the oil spill, hoping it doesn’t come their way. So far they are well out of the range of the spill.
– Rob

Posted in aruba, birds as messengers, hawks, travel | 11 Comments

Days 65-66

Posted on June 24, 2010 by Trish and Rob

Day 65 of the oil gusher in the gulf doesn’t look much better than day 64. Or day 58, 57, 56, 55. In fact, every day the disaster continues looks worse than the day before it. Last night on Countdown, there was a discussion about the worst case scenario – that the gusher can’t be stopped. I wondered what my dad would think of this.

He spent nearly 30 years working for Exxon in Venezuela. He went there in 1937, on the heels of the depression in the U.S., a young man hungry for adventure, the touch of the exotic, and a steady paycheck. He wasn’t an engineer, wasn’t one of the oil rig guys. He was an accountant, a numbers man.

His first assignment was in Carapito, on the shores of Lake Maracaibo, one of 17 ancient lakes on the planet, created more than 36 million years ago. It’s rich in oil,  now filled with wells and rigs. In those days, the Rockefellers were just beginning to tap into the wealth of oil in that lake. My dad lived in an oil camp, a kind of makeshift village where the gringos were housed. He was single in those days and the women he dated were nurses, teachers, women imported from the U.S. and other countries.
 

My dad knew the score. From the start, he realized that the U.S. was exploiting Venezuelas’s resources.But he, like the fishermen and shrimpers now cleaning up the gulf coast, needed the work. The alternative was bread lines in the States. There are points in every life where ideology simply can’t trump necessity.

He returned to the U.S. when war broke out and enlisted. He traveled to India and at some point in a furlough, returned to Tulsa, Oklahoma and met my mother on a blind date. Within six months, they were married, and within a year, he took her to Venezuela, where they lived until 1963.

My sister and I were both born and raised in Venezuela.  We were oil brats. We lived in Maracaibo and in Caracas. This photo is of Caracas  – 3,000 feet above sea level.

 As Exxon’s profits escalated during those years, we flourished. We weren’t rich by any stretch of the imagination, but we weren’t hungry, either. We loved Venezuela – its eccentricities, its mountains and valleys, its dramatic beauty. In the U.S, there are snow days and hurricane days, but in Venezuela, we had revolution days, when the political situation was so unstable that there were runs on grocery stores, gas stations, when everything shut down.

After ninth grade, I went away to boarding school in the states.  There weren’t any good alternatives for high school in Caracas, so Exxon paid for it. I was15. The culture shock was considerable. I was Heinlein’s stranger in a strange land. I hated it, hated the Massachusetts winter, the restrictions, the way the school tried to shove religion down your throat. I begged my parents to let me return to Caracas to go to school. But in my junior year, the Venezuelan government nationalized the oil industry and my father took early retirement from Exxon and he and my mother moved to Boca Raton, Florida. He was younger than I am now. In those days, Boca consisted of maybe three stop lights.Today, it’s a traffic jam.

In later years, my dad became a memeber of Mensa, the high IQ society. It’s not like he was an active member. He just liked  knowing that he, a guy with a high school education, qualified. He often reflected on his three decades in Venezuela as the best he had lived – psychologically, emotionally, spiritually. He regretted certain decisions he’d made, applauded others. But he knew the bottom line was larger than him or his life and that eventually our dependence on oil would suffocate us. He was a Republican, and yet at the end of his life he grew disgusted with politics. He knew the struggle went well beyond how you voted and who was in office.

“It’s always the same,” he said. “We pillage a country that’s rich in natural resources, we cut corners, we create disasters – and then wonder how the hell it happened.”

He might have been describing the present debacle in the gulf.
– Trish

Posted in childhood, oil spill, Venezuela | 39 Comments

SHORT SYNCHROS

Posted on June 23, 2010 by Trish and Rob

Here are several short synchronicities that serendipitously came together about the same time. We’ll start with a couple related to the number 11. 
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There are days when even the synchronicities seem to be working against you, it seems, possibly nudging you to become aware of certain patterns in your life. That was the case for Natalie when the number 11 kept coming up, seizing her attention.

“I have some not so good ones from yesterday….Our car got a flat at 1:11 yesterday afternoon, our daughter vomited all through her bed at 11:11pm, and then my washing machine flooded the laundry at 1:11am. Sheesh!”

It’s up to Natalie to decide what pattern in her life attracted those experiences. Or maybe it was just the trickster, tweaking her awareness in trickster fashion!But, given what has come up recently for Natalie (subsequent posts) the 11 may have been telling her that her psychic work was about to take new, unprecedented directions.,
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As we’ve written before, Jung considered numbers to be archetypes and when we experience a cluster of a particular number, that archetype has been activated in our psyche. Mike Perry has heard all about the 11 phenomenon, but until recently it never part of his own life. 

“I’ve never had clusters of 11’s in my life until this morning. I got on the scales and found my weight was (in UK measurements) 11 stone 11 lbs. This showed on the scales as 11:11. Haven’t been this weight for years, so was a surprise. Later that morning my wife was in the garden and asked me what the time was, and it was 11:11.”

BTW, 11 stones, 11 pounds converts to 165 pounds. Numerologically, that translates to 111, by adding the 6+5. Or, 11+1. So either system, Mike still gets 11’s in the tablulation. For Mike, the experience seems to be a matter of awareness. Now he’ll probably notice more and more such clusters.

Could all the 11 synchronicities being reported somehow relate to the idea that we are in the ‘eleventh hour’ as the Hopi elders said in their message a few years ago?
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Moving on, here’s one from Jane Clifford of Wales about a travel trailer, or caravan, as they’re called in G.B

“In summer I like to have a small caravan as a spare bedroom. I had my eye on one that I could see from my house for a year, but it was not for sale. If it had been, it would have been beyond my budget until, that is, a little water got in one window over the winter. So it needed a little attention, and went on the market. Now it is mine and at a bargain price! I was as happy as a kid with a new playhouse! Yesterday, a friend passed on a novel, and the first page was about a family excited with their caravan!

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Jane happened upon an old magazine and found a couple other short ones–the first is surprising, the second astonishing. .

Mrs Williard Lovell of Berkely, California had locked herself out of her house and was trying to get in for 10 mins when the postman delivered a letter from her brother containing the spare key he had gone off with the previous week. (Talk about timing!)

Charles Coglan, a Shakespearian actor, dropped dead on stage in Calveston, Texas while playing Hamlet in 1898. Since his home on Prince Edward Island was 3,500 miles away, he was put in a vault in a Galveston cemetery by the sea. Soon after a hurricane hit, flooded the cemetry, and his coffin floated away. Eight years later, some fisherman on Prince Edward Island spotted a battered box floating near the shore. Coghlans body had come home and he was re buried for a second time near the church where he had been christened!  

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Finally, here’s one that happened to Rob on the evening that we returned home from our trip to Aruba.

“While unpacking, I happened to pick up a copy of Yoga Journal from a stack of magazines in my office. I glanced at the cover and focused on the title of an article. It was called: 9 Poses to Ground You after Traveling.

“Synchronicity.  I was still feeling somewhat ‘up in the air,’ so I decided to read it. The author, Ross Rayburn, explained that his teacher, John Friend, believes that ‘travel results in decreased apana vayu, the downward-moving, or rooting, energy of prana.’  So Rayburn designed a sequence of poses to root your energy down in order to help you feel physically strong, mentally clear, and energetically balanced after returning from a trip.

“I tried it, and it helped!”
+++
That one’s a good example of how we can attract the energy that we need when we need it. It’s about being in alignment, being in the right place at the right time. That’s the essence of synchronicity.

Posted in 11, local travel, short synchros, yoga | 14 Comments

Paradigm Shift?

Posted on June 22, 2010 by Trish and Rob

 I’m not sure  where Jung would put paradigm shifts. He experienced several during his lifetime, wrote about them,  and the shifts he lived through certainly influenced his search and his writings. But are paradigm shifts strictly cause and effect? If they are mass events, there are invariably synchronicities associated with them even if they aren’t immediately apparent. We’ve posted several of them.

 As we enter day 63 of the oil spill, it appears that the repercussions of this catastrophe could be triggering a paradigm shift about a world energy based in fossil fuels. It may not be huge shift yet, it may not be at its tipping point, but there seems to be progress. According to the article here, Britain has tightened its oil rig inspections. Bulgaria dumped plans for a new oil pipeline that would have carried Russian oil to Greece.  China is upgrading its blowout preventer system. Canada is tightening oversight of its deepest oil drilling ever,
off the coast of Newfoundland.

Despite muted responses from countries in the Mideast, the most important sentence in the entire article linked above may be this one: “The Gulf catastrophe also has sparked a debate over the practice of deepwater drilling itself – with some viewing the spill as reason to ban it altogether.”

Interestingly enough, we ran across another article about research being done by a Cambridge professor, Nicholas Boyle, that points to 2014 as a doomsday moment that will “determine whether the 21st century is full of violence and poverty or will be peaceful and prosperous. In the last  500 years there has been a cataclysmic ‘Great Event’ of international significance at the start of each century. Occurring in the middle of the second decade of each century, they include events which sparked wars, religious conflict and brought peace.” The past dates?  These are intriguing:

1517: Martin Luther and the rise of Protestanism and church reformation

1618: start of 30 years war and  decades of conflict in Europe

1715:  establishment of the Hanoverians, who ruled Britain, Ireland, and Hanover
 (in Germany).

1815: after the defeat of Napolean, the Congress of Vienna occurred and ushered in
 a period of relative stability in Europe.

1914: WWI breaks out

Boyle sees the economic collapse that began in 2007 as the trigger for this doomsday moment. “Big economic changes lead to big political changes and we have not seen them yet.’My thesis is that we have got another crisis to come, and you can already see that in the questions being raised over the debts of nations rather than private credit debts.”

He believes  that because of the colossal power of the U.S. military, America is key to which direction events may turn. “Everything, in the end, may depend on whether America can react more imaginatively to that decline than Britain was able to do in the years before 1914. The only conceivably peaceful route to that goal
is through a continuation of the pax Americana. “But both the world’s understanding of America, and America’s understanding of itself, will have to change fundamentally for that goal to be achieved.”
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The questions I have about Boyle’s research are about other obvious turning points in history: WWII, Vietnam, Iraq. Yet, there does seem to be a glimmer of hope in terms of a paradigm shift and oil. But after I read this Naomi Klein article here,  I’m wondering if the shift is just in its infancy.

Here’s a bit of the Klein article that intrigues:

“In the late 90s, an isolated indigenous group in Colombia captured world headlines with an almost Avatar-esque conflict. From their remote home in the Andean cloud forests, the U’wa let it be known that if Occidental Petroleum carried out plans to drill for oil on their territory, they would commit mass ritual suicide by jumping off a cliff. Their elders explained that oil is part of ruiria, “the blood of Mother Earth”. They believe that all life, including their own, flows from ruiria, so pulling out the oil would bring on their destruction. (Oxy eventually withdrew from the region, saying there wasn’t as much oil as it had previously thought.)

“Virtually all indigenous cultures have myths about gods and spirits living in the natural world – in rocks, mountains, glaciers, forests – as did European culture before the scientific revolution. Katja Neves, an anthropologist at Concordia University, points out that the practice serves a practical purpose. Calling the Earth “sacred” is another way of expressing humility in the face of forces we do not fully comprehend. When something is sacred, it demands that we proceed with caution. Even awe.”

Posted in oil spill, paradigms | 32 Comments

The Festival of Solstice

Posted on June 22, 2010 by Trish and Rob

Posted in Uncategorized | 11 Comments

The Truth is Out There!

Posted on June 21, 2010 by Trish and Rob

Yesterday one of our readers dismissed the human influence on climate change. That’s fine. He can have his point of view.

However, since he invoked the X-Files phrase – The Truth is Out There — we just couldn’t pass up a response. This one comes from the work of a Nobel Prize winning scientist who looked into alien abductions and found a consistent message passed onto the abductees. This article comes from Bhodi Thunder.
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Harvard Professor John Mack, a psychiatrist and a psychoanalyst, was intrigued by the number of cases in which he was finding clients reporting alien abductions. Of course, many people suffering from some form of psychosis might say they were encountering aliens. But what Dr. Mack found was that these people reporting abductions were not insane. They were coherent, rational, and were functioning normally except that some reported stress and overwhelming fear of the abductions.

Obviously, people can and do lie about their abduction experience in order to gain attention. But Dr. Mack reported, “I’ve now worked with over a hundred experiencers intensively. Which involves an initial two-hour or so screening interview before I do anything else. And in case after case after case, I’ve been impressed with the consistency of the story, the sincerity with which people tell their stories, the power of feelings connected with this, the self-doubt—all the appropriate responses that these people have to their experiences.”

Dr. Mack is, unfortunately, no longer with us. He was killed in an auto accident in England while attending a conference.

But the story doesn’t end there.

Dr. Mack found that the alien abductees generally reported similar reasons for the abductions and an unsettling prediction for humanity.

“.…Now, the effect of that is—or what seems to be going on there, in a number of abductees—not just people I see, but the ones Budd Hopkins and other people see—is to produce some kind of new species to bring us together to produce a hybrid species which—the abductees are sometimes told—will populate the earth or will be there to carry evolution forward, after the human race has completed what it is now doing, namely the destruction of the earth as a living system. So it’s a kind of later form. It’s an awkward coming together of a less embodied species than we are, and us, for this evolutionary purpose.

However, that might not be literally true. It might be that that this is a communication to us. That perhaps we need to change our ways. It may not be that these are literally our babies. It may be a kind of expression of images of babies; or it may be that these hybrids we’re told is what will have to be. It’s a kind of insurance policy if the earth continues to be subjected to the exploitation of its living environment to the point where it can’t sustain human and other life as it’s now occurring. But it may not be literally what is going to happen. So that’s one area….”(source pbs.org)

Dr. Mack also says that there is a general theme of the abductees being shown screens of environmental catastrophes. He says they report that even the spirits that live in the same environment that we do will have be displaced.

The cause of all of this future misfortune as reported by the abductees, according to Dr. Mack, will be too much environmental stress caused by pollution and human activities.

The abductees told Dr. Mack that the ETs were sure it was going to happen. So the Aliens started creating a hybrid race for after the eco-collapse.

Sure, it’s interesting that the claimed abductees reported the threat of eco-collapse over the last several decades. But you don’t have to be abducted to know that something has been going terribly wrong for quite awhile. Many, myself included, have indeed warned that we need a drastic and a serious change in the way we have been living. For me and others, the first step to a solution to the environmental nightmare that we were building had to be for people to come to some understanding of the interconnectedness of life and the consequences of their actions.

Perhaps now we have indeed approached the point of no return to that human extinction event reportedly warned by the Aliens.
***
So Mr. K, now you’ve got the scientists and the aliens lined up against your perspective.

Posted in abductees, climate change | 21 Comments

The Summer Solstice

Posted on June 21, 2010 by Trish and Rob

If we lived in England, this is where I would be today, celebrating the summer solstice at Stonehenge. It’s one of those place I have always wanted to visit, so mysterious, ancient, filled with secrets.  Constructed some 5,000 years ago, it’s speculated that Stonehenge was built to worship ancient Earth deities, but no one really knows for sure. Was it a huge astronomical calendar? Did King Arthur actually bring the stones from Ireland?  I’d always associated the Druids with Stonehenge, but apparently Druids worshipped in forests. The best guess is that construction was begun by people of the late Neolithic period around 3000 BC.

An organization called English Heritage is providing “Managed Open Access” to Stonehenge for the solstice.
Poke around on their site for the history of Stonehenge. It’s remarkable. About 37,000 people visited Stonehenge for last year’s solstice. Even more are expected this year. In 2008, the total number of visitors to Stonehenge was nearly 900,000. It’s undoubtedly more popular today, as a ruin, than it was in its prime condition, when of course there were far few souls on the planet.

What rules, if any, did they have for visitors in those ancient times? We’ll probably never know. Here are the current rules enumerated here , which include:
– no camping
– no dogs
– no fires or fireworks
– no glass bottles
– no large bags or rucksacks
– no climbing over the stones

If any of  you plan to attend, we’d love to hear about your experience…and your synchronicities.

Posted in solstice, stonehenge | 18 Comments

Michael Crichton

Posted on June 20, 2010 by Trish and Rob


These book jackets pretty much cover what Michael Crichton is known for – cutting edge, thriller fiction that takes us into what if land. What if some billionaire cloned dinosaurs and turned it into a theme park (Jurassic Park). What if  time travel was a scientific experiment that worked – sort of (Timeline). What if  a gorilla hybrid ape could talk (Congo).

Crichton (1942-2008) the novelist captured what every novelist hopes to capture – suspense from the opening paragraph to the end of the book, you were hooked. There was no opening one of his novels in the bookstore, for a cursory peek,  and oh maybe I’ll buy it. You opened it, read the first few paragraphs, and plunked down your $. It was his gift.

But my favorite among his books is Travels, published in 1988. Nonfiction. Brilliant. It’s the story of Crichton’s journey from a medical student in the mid to late sixties to his vast, exotic travels and his evolution  as a novelist. I first read it around 1990, read it again maybe 10 years ago, and re-read it during our trip to Aruba, I wanted to be reminded of the importance of travel.

“Often I go to some distant region of the world to be reminded of who I really am,” he wrote in the opening pages of Travels.” There is no mystery about why this should be so. Stripped of your ordinary surroundings, your friends, your daily routines, your refrigerator full of your food, your closet full of your clothes- with all of this taken away, you are forced into direct experience.  Such direct experience inevitably makes you aware of who it is that is having the experience. That’s not always comfortable, but it is always invigorating.”

My first read of Travels impacted me profoundly. My second read confirmed certain paths I’d taken. This third read, I admit, was twofold: for the travel part of it, but also to understand how Crichton, who had written so brilliantly about mystical elements in the nature of reality, had become a climate change denier.  This from a man who had climbed Mount Kilamanjaro but apparently didn’t think that its lack of snow was telling.

In Travels, he talks not only about his travels, but about chakras, health in the Louise Hay/Abraham/Hicks  mode (we create our realities), about psychics and quantum physics and so many of the topics we’ve posted about on this blog. Every time I read this book, I’m transported. I feel like this is the genuine Crichton, the real guy.  The man in Travels is a guy who read Seth, got psychic readings, traveled to understand who he was and who he might become. What changed him into a climate change denier? I stopped buying his books once I read about his politics.

 In 2008, at the age of 66, he died from cancer. In Travels, he talks about his early days in medical school, and his ultimate views on health echo Abraham/Hicks, Seth, Louise Hay: the mind creates the dis-ease .How did this guy become a mouthpiece for Bush?

I no longer care about how or why. In reading Travels for the third time, I’m blown away by Crichton’s brilliance.
– Trish

 
Posted in crichton, travel | 29 Comments

Synchronicity or Delusion?

Posted on June 19, 2010 by Trish and Rob

 When Rob was in college, he knew a woman who saw signs–signs in everything. He remembers her playing a Beatles’ song, Here Comes the Sun, and where he heard a simple, pleasant song, she saw vast implications that directly affected her life. He and his friends just went along with her. It was the hippie era and people said all kinds of strange things.

They lived in a large house near a college campus and every few months a new roommate would arrive as one moved on. One guy wove fantastic stories about his past that never happened. In one, he was working as a ski patrol and delivered a baby on the side of a mountain. (Women who are nine months pregnant don’t ski down mountains, except in his world. He didn’t ski, either.)  One woman who only stayed a month wore three or four layers of clothing and played the piano for hours. She also saw signs. Rob doesn’t t know what happened to her, but the first woman he mentioned went into a psych ward.

So what’s the difference between delusions and synchronicity? It can be a fine line between genius and insanity. One famous movie director, whose first movie was a huge, huge hit, started seeing signs in everything. It affected his ability to write and direct and his movies declined in popularity and were ravaged by reviewers. Now he has trouble finding financial backers. Carl Jung skirted madness while writing The Red Book. He called it a “confrontation with the unconscious,” but it looked like madness, and he admitted that.

The point where synchronicity crosses the border into delusion occurs when you begin to believe you’re chosen, that you’re somehow special, that it all revolves around you and your mission, whatever that mission may be. Nut houses and prisons are filled with people who live in self-contained universes constructed on quicksand.

Years ago, Trish worked in a prison for juvenile offenders. One young man, while high on drugs,  had strangled a child  because he believed he was delivering her from evil. He heard voices that urged him to commit this act. He saw signs. Another young man had killed an elderly couple because a voice told him it was his mission.  You get the idea here.

When you begin to believe you’re the voice of synchronicity, that it speaks through you and only you, and then attempt to use this “evidence” to prove you’re not delusional or to prove that you’re innocent of a crime, you’ve crossed the border. Jung’s translator and trusted friend, R.F.C Hull, read the Red Book and called it the “work of a lunatic.” But he also pointed out that Jung was a medicine man in a long line of shamans who “understood madness and could heal it because at periods they are half-mad themselves.” Even Jung, who coined the term synchronicity, never claimed to be its voice.

Synchronicity isn’t the voice of a god or a devil or an inner twin. It is non-exclusive. It belongs to everyone. Anyone, from any walk of life, can experience it, learn from it, and enrich their lives.

Posted in delusions, signs, synchronicities | 35 Comments

The Wind Was Our Compass

Posted on June 18, 2010 by Trish and Rob

On our first day in Aruba, we arrived late at our cottage at the edge of a desert that two years ago was  designated as a national park. Since it’s a new park, there are no official entrances, no park rangers, no paved roads, just double-track dirt paths through the rocky, rolling landscape. Even though it was dark, Megan and I and her cousin, Avery, who had joined us on the trip, decided to walk out into the desert with a lantern. Trish opted to remain at the cottage, and as it turned out, she made a smart decision. We’d walked along a path for about a quarter of a mile, mostly with the lantern turned off so we could see that vastness of the star-studded sky.

We were about to turn back when we stopped, listened closely, and realized we could hear the ocean pounding on the shore in the distance. So we decided to continue on, walking into the wind. About a mile or so later, we found the beach and explored the rocky shoreline. It occurred to me that it was a great night for an adventure, and I put out a wish to the desert spirits that something unusual would happen. I didn’t know it, but Megan did the same. And, oh, we found our adventure soon enough.

We started back, but became confused about the location of the trail. So, with the lantern on, we headed cross-country along an uphill grade. Big mistake. Soon, we found ourselves surrounded by tall cactuses, imposing rocks, thick hedges of prickly cactuses, steep drops and sharp climbs. There were also golfball-sized cactuses growing low to the ground, and it was impossible to avoid all of them. The spikes pieced Megan’s foam sandals and penetrated the bottom of her feet. I pulled out as many of the thorns as I could by the light of the lantern, but she quickly attracted more of them. Meanwhile, Avery was recovering from a sprained ankle and now it was bothering him. Our forward movement slowed to a crawl. Megan could barely walk, Avery hobbled, and they both yelled at me to slow down and come back with the lantern.

Finally, as we reached the top of a hill, we could see the lights on the cottage in the distance, but we couldn’t move toward it. We were blocked and our intended short hike into the desert was turning into a nightmare scenario in the dark, strange environs. By that time, we were all hoping that Trish would drive the rented car out into the desert so we could see where the path was located…and hopefully catch a ride back. No such luck. The key was in my pocket.

So we decided the only thing to do was to backtrack to the beach, and find the trail, basically starting over on our return trip. That’s when I put out another silent call to the desert spirits. “Never mind about the adventure. We just need to find the way back to the cottage.” I repeated it several times. With Megan’s feet and Avery’s ankle, this journey could take us well into the night.

Megan started shouting for Trish, who we later learned had heard her shouts and started scurrying around the cottage, looking for the car keys, then a flashlight that worked. She started out into the desert several times, but her flashlight kept dimming, forcing her to turn back and scour the storage closet for another lantern.

Meanwhile, we knew the way to the ocean was into the wind, which served as our compass. We covered about a hundred yards when eureka, we found a trail. Only thing…it wasn’t the right trail. At that point, we didn’t care. We just wanted to get out of the rugged desert landscape and onto a cleared path. We followed it for about a quarter of a mile when it crossed another path. This time, I knew it was our path, and we turned away from the wind and continued walking.

When the cottage finally came into view again, it was a great sight, and there was Trish standing outside the porch, her dim flashlight barely penetrating the darkness.  “What happened to you guys?” she called.

“You don’t want to know,” I said.

“Oh God, my feet,” Megan groaned.

“We got lost,” Avery said.

The first night adventure was over, and amazingly, it had lasted barely an hour and a half. The three of us had thought we were out there for three to four hours. How the desert spirits played tricks with us that night.

Posted in aruba, desert spirits, law of attraction | 14 Comments