Speeding south to Mexico

This one is about my motorbike journey with number 5 as we sped south to Mexico...

The binary system of an old tune kept playing in my head. Around and around it went to keep pace with the closed loop obsession I was dreaming in, and as much as I defined it, it grew stronger as if I was feeding some kind of monster, some succubus on my spirit that had latched on and was now taking my energy.

I shivered in the new dawn and with lucidity decided to carry on the path I’d chosen to see if there was an answer further along that had no questions.

THE WALL

We were thin as a rake but twice as tall on the motorbike and heading horizontally south for a Mexican handshake through all adversity and were doing quite well until the quest turned down a side road that said: ‘This way to Mexico.’

We had to stop when we came to the wall.

“Now what do we do?” I said, staring at the wall that wasn’t doing much except looking smug.

“Can I interest you in some chocolate?” said a Mexican voice that was hard to find at first until we spotted the hole.

“Who’s that?” I said, seeing only a pair of eyes feverishly staring through the hole in the wall.

“Well it’s me of course, who else would it be?” said the voice on a par with the thin edge of despair.

“You sound distressed,” I said opening up my snuff box to take a pinch.

“Business is slow all of a sudden with this great wall in the way,” said the voice sounding more and more like a Gothic timetable falling in the terms of its surrender to the inevitable.

“I can imagine it must be hard for you doing business through a hole in a wall,” I said about to turn the motorbike around to get back on the main highway.

“Wait,” said the voice, “at least give me a dollar for your fortune telling.”

Number 5 perked up at this, and tapping my shoulder said: “Give me a dollar; I want to know my fortune.”

Five minutes later and we were back on the road with me shouting over my shoulder to know what had been said.

“Keep going south and all will be revealed,” she said, and then fell asleep on my shoulder.

“Sounds like a plan,” I said and carried on south.

HUNTING SHADOWS

I was thinking that I may have been too abrupt in cutting number 5 off after she’d asked me about shadows so I told her an alternative take as we rode along.

“Long before the time of the gold rush where the decompression was another supply of déjà vu over coffee where the happenstance of a feeling glance was enough to send you sideways into the twilight zone and certainly before the days became so short, laughter came from every corner of the places less visited, where the shadow hunters tracked down the other half of what is rarely seen and mostly hidden in the open for all to see.

Not everyone hunts shadows, and those who do, find that when they think they’ve caught one it melts away right in front of their eyes, adding to the fun and making the search more challenging.

Shadows appear and disappear with the wind and are as ephemeral as the clouds, to vanish on being found only to turn up moments later in another place.

Shadows have friends and silent companions that come out to play at first light and stay out all day until the sun goes down which is when the shadow counting happens, and for the one that’s bagged the most a special ceremony is held to uphold the day’s accomplishments and record forever the day of fun.

There are ones who seek solitude in the wide open places of their hearts and fear nothing for they are the shadow to be found and you can find them under the moon’s brightness where the night has least resistance and in the ten thousand silences of the forest and along the cliffs of doom in the storm where most fear to go and also deep in the desert to await the rain’s coming to quench the thirst only that can fill.

It is whispered in the halls of the blind that these ones have played hide and seek with the creator and are favoured above all for they ask nothing and are always ready to be broken open in the great game that comes but once in all the time that will ever be.

These ones have gone to where the love-lost cry with their broken spirits and experienced the devastating separation of that which the whole being longs for and come back from that to find there is no other hell to be feared, and though the wait may be long to go back home, it can be endured.

And so the story goes where the dreaming takes it, and what makes it so bittersweet is that it only comes once to each and that whatever has been dreamed is all there will ever be.

And, it makes no difference in those long halls of fame, for they too will turn back to dust and be but another story among many that with each telling becomes watered down, eventually to join the ocean and be but a part of the whole.

As to your question of: are shadows real, well, to paraphrase Rumi again: your shadows are as real as the drop in the ocean, and when you wake from the dream you will find that the ocean is also in the drop.

You can take the drop out of the ocean but you can’t take the ocean out of the drop.

And perhaps the truth comes in drops to leave you thirsty for more.”

The motorbike hiccupped once to show it had been listening, and as number 5 slept on my shoulder we all sped onwards.

FISHING FOR DINNER

Softly spoken shades of azure mixed with the deep mystery of the ocean sparkled at me as I rowed us out to do a day’s fishing.

I wished I still had my submarine, and the crew. But wherever they were I could only guess.

Number 5 was on the rudder and nodding off; I let her, she was a good girl most of the time and the only one to stick by me after it all went south.

When we were out far enough I baited a line and threw it over to splash and sink down into the depths, and then sat back to dream and wait for a fish to bite.

An hour later and all we’d caught was a wind that picked up and blew us over into the next cove as we dozed and left us there rocking gently on the waves.

We’d come south to where it was warm and built a little hut on the beach and with the last of our money bought a boat to go fishing for our dinner.

I’d been thinking of late that things could be worse, and I hadn’t had a drop of rum since forever so that now I felt like a changed man and growing lazy with barely a challenge to keep me awake.

And as to enlightenment, well, I’d given up on that as a dream too far and that perhaps it was only a subjective closed loop system that kept you searching for something that could never be found until you knew who you were, and knowing that takes enlightenment.

It all kind of made my head hurt until I wished for a bottle of rum and a good adventure to blow the cobwebs away.

A BEAUTIFUL FINDING

Waking up to the sound of the waves lapping as you gently rock in a boat and staring up at the sky is for me the most pleasant experience, and as we rocked there my spirit expanded to become huge and small at the same time and I found myself no distance from the nameless; and in that moment I knew I’d come full circle in my existence to where I’d begun so long ago.

In that timelessness I was but a feeling of pure joy, and I was at one with everything, no separation, and yet I was fully me, not the name or all the things I’d become, but my heart, which was the centre of the universe.

“What time is it?” said number 5 waking up and pulling me back into the mundane stuff of life and living.

“The time is now,” I said and sat up to see where we were.

I looked around and saw we’d drifted close to the sands of a beach in the cove, and there on the sands was a wooden ship leaning over on its side and looking abandoned.

“Ship ahoy,” I called out excitedly and got to rowing right quick towards it, instantly forgetting the realisation of moments before.

MAKE THE FEELING BETTER

Sometimes things happen fast to leave me breathless in the turning and all I can do is hang on and go with the flow regardless until I’ve reached the point of no return and then I wonder what I was thinking before that could have brought me to this where all has changed for the better, and how could I ever have fallen so low as to be on the verge of giving up when life can be so good.

And the answer must be that things change if I hang in there long enough to surrender for what I want to come to me.
And how does it come? It comes in whatever form the feeling of it gives to me.

So don’t get hung up on the words of my defeat that I tell myself but rather find what can be thought to make the feeling better.

Image from Pixabay

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