The Spirit of the Manatee - Peace - Allowing

The baby Manatee brushed up against the side of my sisters leg. She started laughing. Joy and I and my Mother all got in the water to join her. My mother had 'adopted' Manatees over the years and wanted to experience them for real in the wild now. We had been watching four adults and two baby Manatees from our pontoon boat in Crystal River Florida for awhile when Anna, my sister, bravely got in the water to swim with them. We were pointing them out to her as she would slowly approach them and let them choose if they wanted to interact. Here in their feeding area the water was murky so we couldn't see them easily underwater with our masks. We would see a manatee only 3 ft from Anna and point it out to her from our vantage point up on the boat, but when she would look underwater and not be able to see it. So we had to get in the water and trust that these large gentle mammals also known as 'sea cows' would be gentle with us.

The Mother Manatee was trusting her baby to come over and interact with us. I got in the water with Anna and walked slowly over in her direction. I stood still for a minute and I felt something brush up against me...I shivered and let out a 'Wow!' and started laughing. There was something amazing about trusting a wild free animal that I couldn't see come up and brush against me. This is what I had felt that I wanted to learn more about...how to let 'the world', something free, strong & wild come to me and that I would be able to allow it, and trust it, be able to let it in. I felt shivers up and down my body, and I couldn't help feeling happy and enlivened. I had felt that there was something that the Manatees had to share with me that would be helpful for me. I had an idea that it was something about acceptance, allowing life, not 'fighting back', something about 'turning the other cheek' but in a real practical powerful way that would help me in the 'real world'.

Joy and I had gone the week before to swim with the Manatees. We had anchored our pontoon boat, gotten in the waist high water and swum over to the entrance to 'The Three Maidens', the crystal clear springs that gives the name to Crystal River, and as we swum up the narrow channel into the springs a mother and her baby were swimming out! We had to share the stream and passed within a foot of each other. We reached out and felt the mother. How sweet, how trusting she was.

It was like a fairy landscape in the springs. Amazing clear water, sunlight filtering through the trees and playing in the water. Fish, cormorants, the resting manatees, the quiet, the deep springs. The quiet was still palpably present even though people were swimming in and out to see the manatees. It was like the hush in a great cathedral. We later sat on a fallen tree log by the far spring lagoon and just 'felt' the magic there.

A week later when we brought my mother and sister to see the Manatees both Joy and I thought that the ultimate experience would be in the magic springs again and that we should head straight there. But when we arrived there were no manatees at the springs! Not a single one. This made no sense. The guides and dive shop owners didn't understand it either when asked later. But my intuition said to just accept it and go with it and we lifted our anchor and headed out into the bay. I felt to pull into a little spot on a little island. From there we saw some other boats back in a off the main route cove....followed that hint...and we turned the engine off and drifted as we saw several manatees cavorting, playing with their babies...and we got to spend an hour in the 'wild' with the two mothers their babies and a large male manatee.

My mother later said - "That's what I really wanted, I wanted to see them in their natural feeding places out in the wild." She got exactly what she wanted! And we all know that mothers are very powerful!

Along the western coast of Florida the West Indian Manatee gathers in large numbers to 'winter'. Crystal River and Homosassa Springs are two of the main areas the Manatees congregate. Manatee's are a gentle sea grass eating mammal that the Indians honored. The Three Maidens are three springs where the Manatees come and rest. The pictures above are taken in those three springs.

If you're interested in joining a SpiriTravel group on a trip to see the Manatees next year Click Here.

More Love, More Sex, More Money, More Fun!

( this is really what most of us are interested in and this is fine, it's OK, it's G(o)od! )

What if the Earth, the soil didn't say 'yes' and refused to accept the plow opening it up? What if the soil rejected every seed wanting to be planted in it? What if the earth itself closed itself, hardened itself and nothing could penetrate it? No building, no foundations, no tree roots, no grasses, no rivers, no mountains, no canyons could be formed. Nothing could grow.

What if the Sky refused to allow passage, movement through it? No bodies could walk through the air, you wouldn't be allowed to move from exactly where you are, the air would seal you and hold you static, stopped, exactly where you are. There could be no swaying of trees, no birds could fly through the sky, no planes, no movement at all would be allowed because the Sky said 'No'?

What if the Water, the Oceans would say 'No' and close up, not allow anything to move in it or enter it? No boats, no divers, no fish, no kelp. Nothing would be allowed to grow, no erosion forming beaches, no currents bringing warm & cold water, no dolphins, whales, narwhals. What if the Ocean became so rigid and closed that it would not even allow the Wind to move it's surface, no waves?

What if Existance said No to any movement, to any Creation? No consciousness, no thoughts, no experience, no Life, no Sex, no Prana, no Life Force, No Love, No newborn babies, No Puppies, No Dragon Flies, No Flowers, No Suns, No Souls?

What happens to Us - when we say No? When we become closed, hard, unyielding, not open to anything new?

"Most people's Hearts and Minds are like concrete - all mixed up and permanently set."

Any dancer, martial artist, athlete, singer, poet, knows that to close down, to close off the Flow, the InspiritAtion...brings it all to a stand still - Death. They may not know it consciously but they know what works and what it feels like to have movement through them.

Many of us have been so beaten up by our minds ideas of what Life is that portions of us are preferring No Existance - Death, that nothing had been created to begin with. Be honest. Aren't there times that you have wished for no more consciousness? No more feeling, no more awareness? Why else do we 'veg out' in front of our TV's, overeat, overwork, avoid, stay busy? Why else would we have invented alcohol, drugs, prescriptions, one Nation under Sedation? The billions of dollars spent on alcohol, prescriptions and narcotics are all 'self medication' to get away from feeling, to sedate ourselves. This is the 'death urge' inside us that we see manifesting all around us as diseases, wars, stress, psychic pain etc.

But Opening, staying Open to New Life is the only way back to effortless enjoying flowing Being.

You Can't Win! ( over Existance )

Life - Existance - God - Source - Love will always win. The Source that created space itself and the billions of Stars in it will always win over our small minds, our small egos, our fears, our ideas of how and what the creation is or should be.

We can close ourselves off, make ourselves hard, create rigid thought patterns, be stuck in our habits, follow our traditons blindly, go to war over beliefs...but we'll never win. Life will always beat us if we do that. Even if we in our denial managed to blow apart the planet Earth (which we've done with other planets by the way, the asteroid belt is the remnant of a planet we blew up), God - Source - Existance would not worry about it all, would not be rattled or shaken from it's Peace at all. Source - God would care infinitely about each piece of life what would suffer, yes, but in the large picture if we created a 'wake up call' of needing to blow our planet up... it would be no big deal to that which created all of the Uni Verse - the Song of One.

So why don't we 'give up' and 'give in' to flow with that Plan, God's Original Intent, Sources Flow, the Tao, Love's Way?

Does the River argue with the river bank? Do the sun's rays curse space? Do the Mountains argue with erosion? Does the shore line swear at the ocean waves?

So why do we argue, curse, fight with Life - Source - Original Intent - God - Love? We can't win...isn't it time we gave in? Why fight to 'the bitter end'? Why are we so 'stiff- necked'? Do we want to learn the hard way? Do we really need cancer and war, and school shootings. bird flu and nuclear war to wake up? Does all that feel good to you?

This finally giving in to Source, to God's Will to the Flow of Existance, to the Tao, is what Jesus meant when he talked about 'turning the other cheek' & 'judge not lest ye be judged', to quit fighting what is. Fighting it feeds it. Fighting fire with fire feeds it.

Then find where inside yourself you are judging things as 'wrong' out there in 'the world' and 'forgive it', let go, allow, surrender. Allow things to be just as they are & then you will find magic working in your life...What's the difference anyway? It's all a farce! The whole thing is insane! We are manic nut cases running around trying to desperately make the world fit into how we think it 'should' be. Is it working? Or are we just draining ourselves and 'hurrying to our deaths'?

When you finally give up and give in to God, to Love, to Flow, to the Tao you will feel so much better! You will flow again, you will enjoy life again, you will commune with nature, you'll have more money coming your way, you'll find lovers everywhere you turn, animals will be attracted to you, the Wind will want to play in your hair, the Ocean will want to lap at and caress your feet.

So come on....Give Up...and Give In. What do you have to lose? Only all those uptight feelings inside your body, only that pain you're carrying around, only all those ideas in your head that torture you and won't leave you alone, only all those 'responsibilities' that slowly eat your soul everyday.

I will come and do a "Giving Up, Giving In & Falling into Love" Seminar - workshop-playshop no-doing - nothing event if you invite me. We'll let God in, we'll laugh hilariously on the floor, all our 'stuff' won't be serious anymore, we may cry some at first, we may be angry for a few moments, but so what, that's just temporary, underneath all that 'stuff' we are still pure, floating, beautiful, we are still Originally Innocent....and we'll get things moving again.

Feed the Fire

In a large fire you can throw anything practically into it and the Fire will transmute, set free, transform, reduce to ashes whatever it is fed.

Picture, Image-in a fire that you throw old tires, cabinets, couches, all kinds of trash into. It burns it all, trans-forms (makes new forms) of it all.

The Fire 'Accepts' whatever is thrown into it. It swallows, receives, allows, embraces, whatever is fed to it. The fire does not resist what it is fed, it takes it all...and then transforms it to excellent food for new growth. Ashes are an amazing 'out of this world' fertilizer. Ask any one who works with growing plants. When the 'horrible' fire 'destroyed', 'devastated' Yellowstone Park a few years ago we were worried that a national treasure had been severely damaged. Dumbfounding the experts, the biologists, the Park officials, Yellowstone recovered, grew back, grew NEW things, allowed in NEW LIFE, much, much more rapidly than anyone had expected. Aspen trees started to appear mysteriously, the fire having created the exact conditions aspen seeds needed to grow! There were actually more animals, lodgepole seedlings survived fine.

So Mother Nature again (surprise, surprise) creates more beauty, more life, more abundance out of the 'disaster' of fire.

Where in your life could you use some 'housecleaning'? Where would it be helpful if the 'tongues of fire' that descended on the followers of Jesus on the day of Pentecost, would come and burn away some old patterns, some stuck thinking, some recurring fears, some stuck mind programming, some automatic somatics, some in-habit-dead habits?Where would it be helpful to get your 'fire in the belly' going? What would your energy rushing up and down your spine, the kundalini, help burn off? What would be activated in your life if this spiritual fire would blaze again inside you? What dreams would start manifesting? What enjoinments would start coming effortlessly to you?

In the Vedas, the most ancient texts on earth, Agni -the God of Fire, is invoked in the beginning of 8 of 10 of the Vedas. Agni, Fire is the mediator between heaven and earth. He purifies everything.

These ancient vedic rituals are still observed today with offering clarified butter, flowers, rice etc into the fire as a sacrifice.

The Greek goddess Vesta, Prometheus bringing fire to mankind, the Japanese fire god Kagusutchi No Kami, the Jaguar taught the amazon indians how to use fire to cook meat and countless other stories of the transmuting, cleansing power of fire.

Why do we enjoy sitting around the campfire and telling stories? Staring into the flames connects us to something more eternal on a deep archetypal level.

An awakened being is a Fire. A fire of God, of I Am that I Am. Consciousness fire is the finest, most powerful fire there is. It is the place where worlds, whole universes get created and destroyed. This is why Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita describes his vision of the Absolute as 'a thousand thousand Suns', and why Robert Oppenheimer the inventor of the atom bomb quotes this passage after watching the first explosion of his bomb.

The heat in your hands when you touch someone you love, Reiki the Japanese system of healing through the fire of consciousness in your hands...

The Phoenix Bird that is Fire. Reduces itself to ashes but is continually reborn...

When Jesus is 'Transfigured' outside of Nazareth and Moses and Elijah show up and they all start burning from within and turn to Light-Fire so that the disciples have to lay on the ground and not look.

When Manganese, the metal burns the fire is so bright that you cannot look at it directly without damaging your retina.

There are sun yogis who stare into the sun and allow the Sun as a representative of the Source of all Life to activate their pineal glands, the 'seat of the soul'...

Let's let this Fire of ReBirth, of ReGeneration, of TransMutation, of Trans-Form-ation back into your Selves. Let's allow it to do it's work for us. Let us become this Fire of Acceptance of what is around us. When Buddhists talk of 'surrender' and Jesus talks of 'turning the other cheek', Aikido masters speak of 'yielding to overcome'...they are all speaking the language of the ultimate transformer....Fire.

"One must seek the shortest way and the fastest means to get back home - to turn the spark within into a blaze, to be merged in and to identify with that greater fire which ignited the spark."

Innocence Cracks Us Open

"Wild Child full of grace
Savior of the human race...
Natural child, terrible child
Not your mother's or your father's child
Your our child, screaming wild"

All the rules, all our social programming, all our imprinted programmed in beliefs trap us, imprison us, control us, kill us...one by one.

Remember the story in Gulliver's Travels of when he awakens on the island of Lilliput after a shipwreck and finds himself tied down by hundreds of little tiny ropes. But there are so many ropes that though he could easily break one or a few, the hundreds of 'tie downs' create enough power together to keep him imprisoned.

Each tie-down is a 'should' a ' can't do that', 'must do that', 'can't say that' of our civilization, our socialization. And now most of us are walking around completely imprisoned by our thoughts-beliefs-programming. And most of us die in them sadly, never knowing or believing we can become free.

Sometimes an artist comes along that doesn't live by the rules. They are usually considered 'wild', 'weird', 'crazy', and if they make enough of an impact and start to awaken the masses they are often considered 'dangerous', 'unstable' by the powers that be...and sometimes killed. There is some evidence that John Lennon after five years of not creating any music that affected the mass consciousness, was killed by a CIA mind control assassin. Mark David Chapman who had worked for a 'christian organization' called World Vision that apparently worked together with the CIA. This may sound far out to many. Please don't be 'prejudiced' i.e. judge before you know all the facts. It's easy enough with the internet today to research things like this. Here's an ironic quote by Lennon --

"Laurel and Hardy, that's me and Yoko. And we stand a better chance under that guise because all the serious people like Martin Luther King and Kennedy and Ghandi got shot."

Spirit of the Manatee

Trust, Gentleness, Surrender & Non Violence

More Love, More Sex, More Money, More Fun!

You Can't Win! ( over Existance )

Feed the Fire

Innocence Cracks Us Open