A Nature-loving friend recently sent me a wonderful book called Inagua: An Island Sojourn (1940), by Gilbert Klingel, along with a beautiful card she made where these words (among others) were written: “Within oceans, upon reefs of time, patterns of Love, emerge.” A few years ago this friend sent me another book by Klingel on The Chesapeake Bay which I loved. Klingel’s writing opened the world of the water to me in ways I will never forget. Inagua, too, is opening my mind to energy experiences Klingel so beautifully shares. His book is a record of two expeditions to the small island. Klingel was born in 1909 and built his first boat when he was 20. In the late 1930s he and a sailing companion set off from Maryland on an extended voyage, and after a series of "mishaps," found themselves shipwrecked on the island of Inagua (3rd largest island in the Bahamas. Most of his instruments were lost, but Klingel decided to stay, take pictures, and explore the island.
Some of the accounts of his expeditions have been published in other bulletins, but in his book, as he writes, he shares more of the perhaps more human sensations and happenings which “have no place in a biological treatise.”
“Discovery is largely a matter of point of view. I have walked down a street without being aware of its existence. The same avenue from a thirty-story window or from the sanctuary of a manhole between the car tracks belongs to two different worlds; people assume the proportions of scurrying ants or conversely loom skyward like Brobdingnagian monsters. From a thirty-story window a man appears but a mote in a horde of swirling insects, from a manhole he dwarfs the street in which he walks. My submerged position in the pool placed me in the manhole category and put a new value on everything I saw. Only when I have begged, borrowed or stolen an airplane and gazed at the Inaguan surf from the height of a thousand feet will I feel that I have begun to exhaust its potentialities.” (111-112)
Klingel’s book is an expression of his experiences as an energy being, in relationship to this island habitat. His fascination, learning, adaptation, engagement are displayed beautifully in his words, so his love of life as this energy interaction is clear, just as the love my friend shared with me was obvious and clear in the card she wrote to me and the act of sending me this book, which she knew I would love.
As I begin this year of focusing on understanding Energy more intensely, more clearly, in my human life, I appreciate these gifts more deeply than ever. These are energy images that support me in my growth as consciousness, and in my nurturing of this life as the adventure of energy interaction. I’ve been reading a lot about Energy, about our hidden memories (from last year’s handout from Kathy’s first seminar, on Hidden Memories as Cellular Memories), and about how we are a consistent reflection of precisely what and how our mind is thinking, how we are reflecting our thinking into the external reality that we live by the words we speak, actions we take, emotions we live. I love how Kathy writes that we in effect are “text-messaging” ourselves from our own Soul to look deeply into our internal energy fields to recognize the energy images we have created and are living.
What Klingel does in his superb powers of observation of Nature, especially the water, and all of its teeming life and change, I am bound to do internally, as I observe my own history in the making. Friends I have stood with, cried and laughed with, loved (or thought I loved, at the level of my experience of/as love), come to my mind as I assess my experiences, and as the images come and go, I get the text messages from my own soul energy fields identifying distinct levels of thinking, feeling, and emotion that I created and molded as I adapted to the power of the surf, sun, tide, and “intruders.” As I gain experience as a conscious mind, I honor the life of change as its own energy, and the images I know myself to be change with the tide. What is the truth of me? When I feel irritations like infections that are skin-deep, or that go deeper to lead me to an image I have not yet recognized or totally acknowedged and "updated," I marvel at what healing means to me now, how healing feels. I marvel at all of the prompts to myself to Just Listen, observe, Love. I can only change myself, yet I influence all, as energy. What energy do I want to be?
Happy New Years!
No comments:
Post a Comment