Birthing Soul

Befriending the wild nature

Lions, such graceful, powerful and wild creatures. In my days and weeks of preparation for my Spirit Quest, they started showing up in my dreamtime. I don't often dream of animals, in fact I can't remember the last time I saw an animal in my dreams. But here they were, making a dramatic mark on my psyche.

The first one was in my house with me. A massive creature with a flowing mane, sitting next to me while I partially hid behind a wall in case he decided to turn wild on me. I was ready to run.

The next one I see from my car. I pass a wildlife farm in a quaint beach town where a huge lion is hopping over the fence with ease. Realizing this was not ok, I turn with alarm to the driver of the truck I was in and we head to the place the animal was escaping. Coming to an intersection, we meet this massive creature face to face; he was larger than the truck. He comes to the passenger side where I am sitting, quite alarmed, but feeling somewhat safe because my window is closed. Only, it wasn't closed, and when the lion reaches his huge paw into the car, touching my face, I nearly pass out from a heart attack. I can still feel the fluttered pounding of my heart and taste the fear that coursed through me.

I let these images ferment while I prepared for my Vision Quest time in the canyon, wondering what Psyche might have in store.  I knew the moment I stepped across the threshold of the swaying, rickety bridge - swirling river rushing beneath me - that this was going to be a magical time.

A lush oasis in the middle of the eastern Washington desert, the canyon floor was vibrating with life. Every sense was flooded with the wildness of paradise. I could taste the smell of the wild roses and mock oranges wafting through the air. I could smell the multicolored landscape, painted with every variety of green imaginable - from dusty blue-green sage to chartreuse lichen on the rugged canyon walls, and every tone in between. Hundreds of birds sang through the aspens and cottonwoods. Fragrant sage bushes reached out to embrace us and brightly painted copulating butterflies flitted here and there, oblivious to everything but their own sensuous yearning for conunctio.

And so I left behind clocks and computers, cars and cellphones and immersed myself in the wild, sensuous paradise, apprenticing myself to the cycles of nature and the canyon creatures. For eight days I slept on the earth, nestled nurturingly in the grasses with the canyon walls rising to either side; under the piercing white-hot stars that studded the brief darkness of the solstice night sky. I befriended bullsnakes and rattlers, a beaver and a large herd of graceful bighorn sheep, and woke up wide-eyed, heart pounding several times a night to the unknown night visitors or to a pack of coyotes howling in the near distance.

  It was a dance with the wild and a dance with my own fears - not unlike the fears that I vividly felt in my lion dreams.

Halfway through our time there, we were to have a three day solo quest. So having had some moving experiences with the bighorns, I perched myself on a rugged bluff, surrounded by cliffs above and below, and plenty of evidence of sheep life all around. By day I could watch the heard make their way along the opposite canyon wall. You could always hear them first, moving along the uncertain slopes of fallen rock, often causing mini-avalanches. I woke up to magical mornings, with mamas and babies watchfully grazing on the bluff next to mine. But by night I huddled nervously in my mummybag, hoping nothing wild would eat me.

By night my rugged canyon cliffs became darkness and shadows. And while hearing night movement on the far canyon wall was somehow comforting, hearing movement on the talislope 10 feet away was highly alarming. More than once the talislope avalanched in the moonless darkness with a large creature moving over it, and all I could think of was cougar. My dreams were coming back to me, but this time in real life - what our quest guides called a waking dream. Night after night, I'd wake up to pitch darkness, utterly alone, with a large animal very close. My heart would pound adrenaline through my body and every nerve and fiber of my being would train itself on the blackness, my ears and eyes and even senses I didn't even know existed would strain to get a glimpse of what I was certain would be my death. And then I would hear nothing for a while, and the moon would rise and I was still alive, and I would slip back into a fitful sleep. That side of the canyon was officially the "wild" side though, and I couldn't sleep facing it, I felt too uneasy.

On one of those nights, I dreamed again of wild creatures - this time skunks - on the other side of a window. I wanted to reach out this time and pet them, but I was afraid of their wildness. Afraid they would spray me. And so I didn't break through the barrier. I kept the protection of the window between me and the wild.

Afternoons grew hotter and hotter as the week progressed, and I found the only shade on my solo was at the base of the cliff on the "wild" side of the canyon. So I found a place where the sheep had nested to lay my tarp out and spent midday napping and journaling there, listening to sound of the creek far below as it echoed through the canyon and graced my ears with the roaring of a thousand trickles.

By the last night of solo, I was no longer afraid of the wild darkness and woke up facing that side of the canyon, smiling. In the end, I lived. Nothing wild ate me (other than mosquitoes), and I think I actually befriended a bit of my own wild nature. They say dreams are a snapshot of your psyche. If so, the dream I had the night I returned home speaks volumes.

I was at a retreat in the mountains, and through a window I could see two tigers climbing the tall fir trees with ease. Next thing I know, they are on the other side of the window from me. One of them is reaching her paw through the place where the two panes connect. Instead of shrinking back in fear, I reach out and touch the massive, soft paw and she curls it gently around my finger. I feel no fear. Even as she moves her body through the two panes of glass I look on with awe and delight. Both tigers circle around me and snuggle up on my lap. I am aware that this is an amazing experience, even recalling the other dreams where I was scared to death. I bask in the beauty and strength of the powerful creatures knowing this was a monumental moment.

So if you look at me and notice something a little different, it could just be that I'm a little extra sunkissed. But if you look closer you may see the faintest glimmer of a wild tigress in my eye.

Living Deeply: The Art and Science of Transformation in Everyday Life

MP3 File

Length-53 minutes, 33 seconds

Ms. Janette Merrill, host of Birthing Soul Podcast, interviews Dr. Marilyn Mandala Schlitz, author of Living Deeply: The Art and Science of Transformation in Everyday Life published by Noetic Book /New Harbinger Publications.

Dr. Marilyn Mandala Schlitz

Marilyn Mandala Schlitz, Ph.D. is a clinical research scientist, medical anthropologist, writer, speaker, thought leader, and change consultant. Her work over the past three decades explores the interface of consciousness, science, and healing. She  grew up in Detroit Michigan and received  a Bachelor of Philosophy Degree from Montieth College, Wayne State University. She went on to gain a Master's Degree in Social and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Texas, San Antonio and she received her Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Texas, Austin. She also earned two post doctoral fellowships: one from the Cognitive Sciences Laboratory at Science Applications International Corporation and one in Psychology at Stanford University.

She is currently Vice President for Research and Education at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, Senior Scientist at the Research Institute at California Pacific Medical Center, and co-founder and Chief Learning Officer for the Integral Learning Corporation.

She has published hundreds of articles on consciousness studies in both scholarly and popular journals and has lectured widely on a number of topics, including talks at the United Nations, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Explorers Club. She has taught at Trinity University, Stanford University, and Harvard Medical Centers, as well as lecturing to community groups and book stores across the United States.

She is an engaging speaker with a rare ability to translate complex ideas into a common sense language that excites the imaginations of her audiences worldwide. Her books include: Consciousness and Healing. Integral Approaches to Mind Body Medicine (Churchill Livingston/Elsevier, 2005) and Living Deeply: The Art and Science of Transformation in Everyday Life (New Harbinger/Noetic, 2008). Visit her website.

Creatura: archetype of a roaring belly goddess

There is a force that lies deep within a woman. A raw, instinctual, chthonic creature with a guttural, reverberating voice. A force often subdued by culture and the fears of men because of the raw instinctual power she possesses. This primal Creatura can be found in the bowels of the earth, in deep caves and mucky places. She can be found in the depths of the ocean. Anywhere you hear a deep rumble or groan, a cry that reverberates from deeper than deep, that's her voice. And she is found all around you, in the dark inner recesses of women in whom she is awakened.

Hers is a primal force that comes out of the gut, but deeper. Out of the center depth of a woman's being, out of the uterus of her psyche. She is a life-force, she is a death-force. She is the force that literally possesses a woman in natural childbirth as cries and pushings and groanings emanate from the mother's core. She is the primal force that watches over tender budding life and then takes over the mother's whole being, banishing the little one from the depths with rhythmic, rumbling deep-ocean-like waves of power. Bringing both mother and child ever so close to the momentarily thinned veil separating death and life.  She is there as the blood supply is severed and death hovers ready to clench its icy jaws, while little cells scream out for life giving oxygen. And she is there as the new air that fills the lungs for the first time with raw vibrant force, and the first cries of the newborn reverberate throughout the room.

The Creatura stirs when sexuality begins to awaken. She flickers open a dragon-like eye when the first days of blood appear and a yearning and primal cry ache from deep within. She is coaxed to a dark, powerful life by adept fingers who call forth groans that emanate from the depths of her primal being. You can hear her same powerful voice in the roar of an earthquake as it rumbles through the bowels of the earth, or in the power of the sea as it surges and breaks forth from the dark depths below.

Clean, protected and cultured women may sense her primal flicker, even feel her power in these fleeting encounters. But Creatura cannot be summoned from the mountaintops, or from the sunny days of innocence, or from tropical landscapes of leisure. It's only in the mucky, dark and painful journey through the underworld where one faces dismemberment and the transforming power of death, that chthonic Creatura is evoked in all her power, passion and vibrancy.

The same power that banishes the baby from the safety of the dreamlike womb also banishes the woman from the protected womb of childhood, the state of unconscious naivete, plunging her into a dark initiation. She brings her down into a land of shadows, demons and predators where they serve as mirrors to her psyche. The descent through the second birth canal can be crushing, dark and overwhelming, but just as in birth, Creatura is hovering rhythmically, carefully guarding the process. Waiting until just the right moment, when the pain seems so great, the tormentors so strong, and the darkness too engulfing, she erupts from the belly of a woman with a guttural roar, a cry that shakes the underworld.  And the woman is born.  Creatura has awakened within her: a razor toothed, chthonic, crocodile creature in her core.

This roaring belly goddess is dirty and caked in clay and mud but incredibly powerful; her tail taking down trees, her mouth shattering bones. She is cyclical, rhythmic, orgasmic. She is birth pangs and grief groans and the rage that erupts from the deep at abuse and injustice. She is life and death and the power of rebirth.

She is not a rational, keen or cutting force like that which is centered in the mind. She is not the light, generous and giving force that emanates out of the heart. She is dark, instinctual, mucky and vibrant. She is primal. She is the power you have in you as a woman. She may be dormant but she is there in every birthing and transformative process a woman goes through. She may lurking in the deep with half opened eyes, but once she is awakened, and indeed she will awaken, nothing will stand in her way.

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La Luna Roja

I took the girls tonight to the little strip of country on the edge of town to watch the moon be gobbled up by the earth's shadow. Filled with wide eyed wonder and excitement we saw our first glimpses of the partly shadowed moon through the trees as we made our way to the dark little road that cuts through an agriculture area.

We pulled up into the same little turnoff where I stumbled onto the Leonid meteor shower a year or so ago. We unloaded from the car and watched in the cold night air as the silvery brightness gave way to a deep reddish hue.

The last time I remember seeing this event was as a child of maybe 4 or 5. I vividly remember the moon turning red and I didn't understand why though I'm sure my dad explained it to me. I just remember the wonder I felt.  Maybe that's why I felt full of excitement, giddy like a child again tonight, seeing the world with eyes of awe.

Through the many phases of my life, I've looked up to the night sky and felt that same sense of wonder and awe. A sense of the infinity and grandiosity of the universe that overshadows our short little lives. To see the intricate workings of the cosmos in such a dramatic way like tonight's lunar eclipse makes you for a short time, glimpse the world - and your place in it - in a vastly diffrent light. And even though you feel like such a small organism in the scheme of the universe, it somehow imparts a sense of honor, a sense of purpose. I belong to this place, right here, right now, and yet I'm a part of the infinite expanse of time and space, part of the universe becoming conscious of itself. Wow. What an honor!

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Nature and the Human Soul: Cultivating Wholeness and Community in a Fragmented World

MP3 File

Length-1 hour, 6 minutes, 38 seconds

Ms. Janette Merrill, host of Birthing Soul, interviews Bill Plotkin, Ph.D, author of Nature and the Human Soul: Cultivating Wholeness and Community in a Fragmented World published by New World Library.

Bill Plotkin, Ph.D., is the author of Nature and the Human Soul: Cultivating Wholeness and Community in a Fragmented World and Soulcraft: Crossing the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche. In his work at the Animas Valley Institute  - and around the world  - Bill draws on dreams, the natural world, poetry, depth psychology and many cross-cultural soul-encounter practices such as vision-fasting, council, trance-rhythms and conversations across species boundaries. Visit him online at http://www.animas.org.

Visit Janette Merrill's forum and Myspace page.

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Paradigm shift

I sense their sadness and disappointment in me. They look with down-turned eyes and keep a safe distance, whispering at how far I've fallen; how sad it is that I've left the fold. I'm sure some have genuine concern for my spiritual wellbeing while others have shaken the dust off their shoes; having warned me of my spiritual peril, then leaving me to my fate.

It's true, I've left the carefully fenced and safely guarded pasture in search of the wild forest. I've wandered from the safety of the sacred barn with its food troughs filled with pre-digested spirit-meal and dried alfalfa laced with hints of legalism. I've explored outside the familiar boarders and found a land filled with such wild beauty where Spirit is everywhere, waiting in its raw form to interact with and nourish the seeker. Where sacred space is found under the magnificent beauty of the brilliant night sky, or in the sparkling warm touch of sunlight dancing on bare skin.

True, my paradigm is changing. But there's no need to mourn my absence as if mourning my death. It's like a snake who sheds the old skin that no longer fits to reveal the vibrant, shiny new one underneath. Like the snake, I'm still essentially me with the markings of my unique personality; quite possibly more authentically myself than ever. Something to be celebrated, not mourned. Far from walking away from God, I am walking toward Spirit, toward an authentic discovery and expression of my own soul.

It's not that my paradigm has changed from one set of beliefs to another. It's more like it's expanded to include both the very real encounters with God/Spirit/The Great Mystery that I experienced in my adolescent and early adult faith as well as new encounters I’m exploring now through a variety of spiritual, mystical and soul-transforming traditions.

I’ve come to understand religion and spirituality in a different light. As for traditional religion, I was never drawn to a dry, spirit-less religious practice. Not to say it’s without worth; I’m sure many find solace and safety in a pre-defined set of rules by which to define their life. But it’s just not for me. I was always drawn to a more fluid encounter with Spirit; what some would call a “relationship” rather than a religion.

But having said that, I am beginning to realize that encounters with Spirit happen in many cultures and traditions, using different techniques that act as “on-ramps” to a universal experience that is encountered through the flavor and filter of a particular culture or faith. Some whirl and twirl into ecstatic union with God, others get lost in a rapturous worship service. Still others enter an altered, spiritually open state with the aid of drumming, sacred plants, body postures and/or breathing techniques and have real experiences with Spirit/Divine as well as encounters with their own Soul. Through yoga you experience the close connection of body and spirit; through Tantra you can experience spiritual enlightenment through the sacred act of sexual union. Each technique offers its own profound experience and life-changing, soul-transforming potential.

So it’s not that I’ve walked away from a search for God, I’ve actually embraced a larger circle in which to have that relationship. It’s exciting and awe-inspiring and humbling all at the same time. The more you learn, the more you realize how much you didn’t know before, and that your world-view is consistently too small. It’s about expanding that paradigm and experiencing Spirit in all facets possible, without fear or self-righteousness, without an attitude of spiritual superiority where you have the corner-on-all-truth. It’s about the freedom to wander outside the protected pasture and experience the Wild Spirit, instead of what comes pre-packaged in a Sunday morning sermon.

So if you don’t find me anymore in the sacred barn, with it’s man-made walls and stalls and dung-covered floors, it’s not that I’ve forsaken Spirit. If you wander outside the sacrosanct boundaries, you’ll see that I’ve found my freedom, my awe and my sacred space under the starry sky, on a richly fertilized, wild forest floor. If you come close enough, I’ll pull you down next to me and tell you about all the amazing experiences I’ve had with Spirit on my journey so far.

No, no need to mourn my spiritual death; I’m more alive now than ever.

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Essence of Tantric Sexuality

MP3 File

Length-52 minutes, 17 seconds

Ms. Janette Merrill, host of Birthing Soul, interviews Mark Michaels (Swami Umeshanand Saraswati) and Patricia Johnson (Devi Veenanand) authors of Essence of Tantric Sexuality published by Llewellyn Publications.

Patricia Johnson and Mark Michaels

Mark Michaels (Swami Umeshanand Saraswati) and Patricia Johnson (Devi Veenanand)a devoted married couple who have been teaching Tantra and Kriya Yoga together since 1999. Their popular workshops have been featured in several publications, including the Village Voice, Now magazine, and Breathe magazine.

The two seek to combine a traditional, lineage-based approach with the best contemporary, Neo-Tantric methods. Their approach includes breath work, meditation, chanting, and puja (a type of Hindu devotional ritual), and their "initiated Kriya yoga" practices aim to lay a spiritual foundation for bringing the heightened awareness and pleasure of sex into everyday life.

The authors are senior students of Dr. John Mumford (Swami Anandakapila Saraswati) and have been named lineage holders of the OM-Kara Kriya® system for the Americas and Sunyata, coauthor of The Jewel in the Lotus, named Michaels his lineage holder in 2001.

Michaels and Johnson have studied Bhakti Yoga with Bhagavan Das and Tantra with Dr. Rudy Ballentine, and they have been featured in Dr. Judy Kuriansky's The Complete Idiot's Guide to Tantric Sex.

Michaels is a graduate of New York University School of Law, is a member of the Bar in New York State, and holds master's degrees in American Studies from NYU and Yale. A playwright and translator, he translated and adapted Goldoni's The Mistress of the Inn, The Thrill of Victory, The Agony of Debate, which premiered at New York's Primary Stages.

Patricia Johnson is a professional operatic soprano who tours extensively throughout the United States, Europe, and South America and has performed with the New York City Opera, the Houston Grand Opera, and the Berlin Komsiche Opera.  Visit their website.

Visit Janette's blog and podcast.

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From Roots to Branches: a Journey through the Tree of Life

MP3 File

Length-59 minutes, 55 seconds

Ms. Janette Merrill, host of Birthing Soul, interviews Mr. Wayne Gray Huxhold, author of From Roots to Branches: a Journey through the Tree of Life  published by Infinity Publishing.

Mr. Wayne Gray Huxhold

Wayne Gray Huxhold has a rich and varied inkpot of history in which to dip his quill. He was reared in the small factory town of New Castle, Indiana, was educated as a maritime navigator who briefly traveled the world, yet settled back into the perceived safety of familiar and mundane routines of his former home. After struggling for seventeen years with failed marriages, financial woes and an unfulfilling career, he knew it was time to change. Wayne, as the poet David Whyte relates, "arranged to become good and tired of himself." At this point, he began his journey of writing From Roots to Branches, an act that transformed him. Now as an author, poet and artist, he shares studio and living space with his lovely wife, the ceramic sculptor Diana Huxold.

From Roots to Branches: a Journey through the Tree of Life is the account of Wayne's psychological, spiritual and mythic journey of radical transformation. As Wayne began to explore the ever-growing depths of his roots, he began to uncover truths and wisdoms that he could neither deny nor ignore. Truths and wisdoms that conflicted with the self-manufactured reality of all he believed was true. His very identity was challenged and eventually collapsed, freeing up space for a new life to emerge.

From Roots to Branches is a modern mythology, a universal story of finding and living ones authentic self. Throughout the book the author identifies, confronts and breaks lifelong patterns of living for the approval of others. He encounters and overcomes the fright associated with living beyond the familiar aspects of his known world. To the reader, the book becomes a mirror as they begin to recognize aspects of themselves within it, yet finds hope as they see how the author's authentic self begins to emerge.  Visit Wayne Gray Huxhold's blog.

Visit Janette's podcast.

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Birthing soul

For the first time in a whole lifetime it seems, I'm beginning understand the call of soul;  the call of the depths. Out of the chaos and pain of my 20s I've craved answers, a conscious understanding of my issues and the decisions that turned my life upside down. But even more deeply, I realized I've all along  been craving a deep, vibrant inner life.

My adolescent faith seemed to offer it, I thought that if you just seek God enough he would take care of all the rest... heal the inner wounds, fill the longings for something real and vibrant inside. So my quest was always outward, upward, toward Spirit. But the passion too easily turned into head knowledge and a meaningless obsession with right belief and right action, and keeping up the right reputation. Even in the moments of mystical ecstasy, the focus was outward and upward, toward the light. The dark symbolized evil, the body and the flesh evil as well - something to be conquered and subdued. And soul? Soul was not understood or even talked about.

And yet, soul was calling. Though it took a decisive, tumultuous upheaval of my entire life to finally follow the call down, down into the depths, down through the roots to the core of being. To the underworld. The dark, moist, fertile and sometimes frightening abode of soul.

But there in the darkness of loss and depression, of catastrophe and the shearing away of my pride, the loss of my sense of self, the disintegration of life as I had known it... there in the putrefying slime of rotting death, I began to sense something powerful and numinous, something that I could only describe as spiritual.

Through dream-work, depth psychology and  monumental books, I embarked on a quest for the inner life, a quest for soul. Not that I had called it by those words or was even conscious of what I was searching for. It wasn't so much something that was in my head as in my gut... a drive, a force within me. It was either find meaning to all of this or die. I wrestled with the inner demons of my childhood and early adult pain. I wrestled with understanding painful choices I had made, searching for answers and the answers brought me down to soul. Why did I make the choices I did? Soul starvation. What now? Birth soul.

And so that has been the driving passion for the past several years of my life. First merely to survive the dark and painful process of transformation, to dissolve into the blackness of the womb-like cocoon and die there as the being that I once had been. Not seeing life on the other side or the beautiful creature that would eventually be birthed, but trusting somehow that through the heavy darkness something indeed was happening. And then to birth something in that dark place that I could take to the world one day, on vibrant and multi-colored wings.

As I get some distance and perspective, understanding is beginning to crystallize. I'm finding the deeper meaning to all the pain, all the darkness. I'm realizing now that spirit and soul are two sides of the spiritual coin, and both are necessary to experience a vibrant, connected life. That just like a tree reaches down into the depths of the earth for strength and nourishment we need to dive into the dark places and develop a deep, rich inner soul life. Yet just as the tree reaches upward toward the sky, soaking in the light and receiving elements of its life from the sun, we also need to reach up toward Spirit, toward the Divine, and let the Light work it's transformational process in us as well.

Just as the unmedicated birth of a child is a profound initiatory experience into powerful womanhood, so the dark, painful birth of soul is an initiation into a vibrant and meaningful life. And so it has become my passion and purpose to facilitate the birthing of soul - a sort-of soul midwifery.

I invite you to join me on this quest, to not just live a successful outer life, but to become vibrant and bursting with passion that comes from a deep inner fountain. Maybe you've heard the call to soul, or maybe you are in the dark place now, wondering if you will survive, wondering who and what you will be on the other side. Come with me into the depths and find something beautiful.

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The edge of infinity

 It was one of those moments where the universe opens up, where the infinite and the finite meet for a magical moment in a lingering, passionate, cosmic kiss.  A moment that floats down to you from the crystal clear star speckled sky like a fragile, precarious bubble descending on a moonbeam. It's beauty you hold in your hand in awe and with the tenderest of touches knowing that if you even dare to breath, the moment might be lost.

The moonlit waves crashing on the sand stretched longingly toward nearby mountains; pounding relentlessly against the massive rock that rose like a giant out of the surf. The sweet smell of a smoldering driftwood fire hung in the air. The air was cool and still, pregnant with an aura of magic beauty. It was a moment that you savor. A moment that you honor. A moment you hold in awe, in reverent worship. You talk in hushed voices about deep things of the soul. In the moment where heaven and earth connect, you quiet yourself enough to hear, to see eternity with your own eyes.

It's a moment that the soul connects to the deep - the deep that calls out with a mournful sound as it crashes upon the shore. The seemingly infinite, realizing its finiteness as it stretches itself upon the moon drenched sand. The deep that calls from the endless expanse of sky, stretched from horizon to horizon, reaching back through the eternal expanse of the universe, yet coming to meet you in that moment, in that place.

It was the deep that resonated from the giant rock standing firm for aeons against the pounding surf, testifying to a stubborn strength beyond imagination. It was the deep that echoed to me from the mountains behind, rich with history, a life of their own. It was the deep that beckoned to me in the flood of silver moonlight, splashing all around, gently gracing the landscape with a magical glow.

It was the deep that rose from the depths of my own soul in that moment, that yearned - that cried to mingle it's voice with the depths of eternity, the depths of that very instant, the voices of the depths that serenaded around me, echoing against the hills an eerie, harmonic symphony that crescendoed to a climactic... silence. And just like that, the moment passed. The cascading symphony caught in the fragile bubble of time burst with a tender pop. And all was once again normal.

I walked back through the sand feeling a bit sad that I left the magical moment at the base of the powerful rock, under the moonlit crashing waves, under the canopy of stars. Unsavored, but not unrecognized. Yet in one last burst of magic, I see a star streaking through the sky reminding me that I may not always be in that magical moment, but the depths of infinity are never far away.

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