Transcription
Around the Cosmic Campfire by Tony Wright
Chapter Five: So Close
In writing, I often mentioned I was born in the Midwest, and the first time I ever saw the ocean was when I was 20 years old. I had never seen water that big. We had gone to Portland, Oregon, to visit the brother of my husband, who lived there with his also quite young wife. They were college sweethearts, and there I was with my high school sweetheart, Denny, whom I had adored since I was 16. They loaned us their Volkswagen Beetle to drive the Pacific Coast, to have our first ocean view and eat some fresh seafood, which I was totally unaccustomed to. After all, I was from the land of pigs and cows, and not much incredible was really swimming around there. So we drove to Cannon Beach and then on up to the coastline to wade out to some monoliths, moving on to have ocean clams the size of dinner plates and watch the sunset. It was spectacular—the first view of the big water. And at dinner, we saw a double rainbow over the waves in the distance. Each end of the rainbow was coming right out of the water, with the opposite end going directly back into the surf. It was a total, complete, uninterrupted double rainbow, and I fondly held that initial ocean view for many, many years to come.
But it wasn't until I had my first glimpse of the emerald waters of the Gulf Coasts in Florida that I felt my personal deep magic of being at the ocean. It could have been that white gypsum sand I felt underfoot on my first walk on Grayton Beach that did it. It was a magic, or some new energy I had not experienced before. It may have been truly an example of a quartz-type sand being a generator of energy that can be taken up into the body and consumed like a wonderful food. Gypsum holds warmth within it, and I always felt as if it was healing my body when I went to the white sand. It was like resting on a gentle battery to me, recharging me as I was also fed by the sun.
For the timeline, it was about 33 years after my Oregon Coast coastal experience of double rainbows that I set foot on the white sands in Florida for the first time with my partner and traveling companion, Scott. We made a handful of trips to the coast to have grouper and some kind of not-too-expensive organic wine and watch the sun dive quickly into the darkening waterscape every night. Many times during our visits, we would see pods of dolphins going by our rooms' terrace, and it was exhilarating to watch them move in tandem, disappearing in the distance and occasionally leaping into the air as if performing a synchronized show for humans of undisclosed identities.
We journeyed down there from Tennessee, and a couple of times in a row, I realized I didn't see one single dolphin. I started to wonder about them. Were they disappearing? Was everything okay ecologically? Was humanity and overdevelopment of the area chasing them farther out to sea? I wanted answers. I was perhaps being silly, but I wanted to answer; I wanted the answers from the dolphins themselves. And so it was the final trip we made together that I made a vow: I would commune with a dolphin for sure. That time, I really wanted to—so much it became almost a pledge: "Dolphins, I will see you this week, and I will call to you, and you will speak to me."
On this particular day, we had purchased our four-dollar-per-day pass to go to the beautiful state park on the beach. It was complete with showers and drinking fountains, parking, and also a few parents to clutter up my hopefully more private landscape of it all. I've always been very solitary and often travel in seasons when others usually do not; in that way, I love my privacy, and I'm always grateful for it. We put out an umbrella for the benefits of my Swedish heritage, as my skin has always been so tender, radically fair, and easily freckled, and we started resting in our folding chairs. The wind was a bit unruly, but I was otherwise very satisfied, as we were oddly the only two people on that quadrant of the beach. It was divine.
I had been sitting there for quite some time and saw no dolphin activity. And as I strained my mortal vision all the way out to the horizon for dolphin movement as far as I could see, I saw nothing swimming, nothing moving to entertain me or reassure me that they were there—not one dolphin. I decided, since no one was around and obviously no one was looking, I would take action, and I started talking to the dolphin community out loud and through the ethers, just for fun. As nutty as it might have sounded and would have seemed to someone else observing, I was talking out loud to myself. Scott had gone down the beach a ways to wade into the surf, as it was a bit too chilly yet to actually swim, so I would have been talking out loud to the wind if there were any onlookers. I told the dolphins, "I love you. I want you to be well and to be thriving here in this complicated world of people and trash and loud and fast boats and gasoline in the water and oil drilling. I love you so much, and I want you to know that I am not like many others. I honor you and know you are guides with your language and communication; that you are plugged into energies that we do not yet understand. You have powers; you are amazing. I am a different kind of woman on the land. I just wanted to say hello and let you know I honor you."
I want to know that you are okay. Some kind of a soft rant into the wind of that verbal vicinity. As I was speaking, I looked right in front of me, directly in line with my beach chair and umbrella, only a few feet away—just right there at the water's edge, almost too close for a dolphin to reasonably come into the shore—was a beautiful dolphin. Beautiful. It was right in front of me, not swimming by but stationary, looking at me—my dolphin—yes, looking at me right there, completely still, staring at me. Our eyes truly locked, and it was complete magic and made—made no sense at all to me—well, not to a normal person. How could a dolphin sit motionless and stare at a person in just knee-deep water? How could we stare at each other for so many minutes? I was breathless. It was like a sweet dream; I could almost not believe my eyes. I froze in my beach chair, as I did not want—did not want—to move and frighten it. I said hello to it, and it was all I could do to not burst into tears. I said, "Thank you, thank you for everything. Thank you for coming to me and affirming that I am still a great manifesto, and against all odds, you came to me; you are still here with us."
The dolphin was all alone and definitely curious about me. I felt the sweet dolphin, and it was—it seemed to be saying all was well and to rest. Minutes later, Scott had started to meander on backward toward me from down the beach and stopped a ways back as he saw me talking to the dolphin. He was afraid that it might get beached if it came in closer. I saw him and quickly maneuvered itself to swim back out to wherever it had come from. Yes, my dolphin—it came to me. Who would ever even believe it? I could barely speak. My heart leapt out of my throat, and I squealed, "Did you see that? Did you see that?" He was stunned, as he had known my mission was to manifest a dolphin on that trip and had smiled when I told him that in the car with a sort of "yes, dear" type of response, but he was stunned and almost shocked and explained to me that when he lived in Key West, working for some time on a fishing boat and living on the coast, he had never personally seen a dolphin come into shore that close and in that way—ever—at least not on purpose. It looked like it was trying to figure out how to just come and sit with me. I smiled—I smiled a new smile. I was learning what amazing beings we can be, and that sentient life is connected to all other life, and we have things to say to each other, and we can listen to each other, if not through words, but through frequencies, as if we are tuning in to each other's radio station, listening and feeling the programs we are broadcasting. It is incredible, and nothing is impossible, is it? A god station? I believe so.
I learned how every day we can have so much fun as we bring so much joy right into our own lives and be in delight with all the magic and mystery that abounds. I am still grateful when I see a picture of a dolphin—any dolphin—and honor the special communion I had with the one who came to tell me something. What it shared with me was a feeling, as it looked like it was sincerely smiling again. The transmission I felt at relay was that they were—that we are all right—that all is well and to have faith and for me to keep helping others awaken and to keep drawing to me all that I desire. And for certain, I do just that. I keep drawing to me what I desire, and the truth is it is not ever far away at all. Mostly we must just know what we want before it will come to us, and when we are certain it must come to us—that is God's universal physics and how things work. We are amazing creatures of our lives. I'm here to teach you: we could be having so much more fun than we currently are. We don't have to struggle so much. We can play and tune in and swim amidst deep sunsets. We can heal and love and smile at perfect strangers and perfect dolphins. Everything that we want is always just right here—just right here. And I know this because my antenna is always up; my radio station is always tuned in, and well, because of course the dolphin showed up and quietly told me so.