In Three Sisters Spring, a highly-visited spring in central Florida by manatees and people watching manatees, there are areas set aside as sanctuaries for resting manatees. Humans are not allowed to follow them past the barriers and the manatees know this. They head to these quiet places to rest and seek respite from the colder river.
I totally understand their desire to hide from massive amounts of people in this ‘warm’ water haven. In fact, I have often wanted to request a sanctuary for humans that simply want to float in stillness and quiet rather than be among those kicking, splashing, talking, yelling or crowding manatees….where is my sanctuary?
Earlier this week I found it. Two days in a row I had the spring to myself. Well….there were fish and a cormorant and maybe a sleeping manatee but there were no other humans. I floated face down watching the spring bubble up 15 feet below me and dropped into a deep stillness that comes when I’m in water, in my happy place.
There was no splashing, no loud voices…it was an amazing experience of beauty and peace.
Ripples of light reflecting off the sand created a wave of rainbows in constant motion. Bliss…delight…wonder…awe.
Suspended weightlessly, the spring and I were one. There was nothing except those moments of harmony. What a time of renewal, of restoration.
One afternoon there was a large, sleeping manatee. I swam far away and past it to the big spring for my meditation. The manatee and I held space for each other to rest and relax with no expectations or demands. All encounters are not face-to-face. Perhaps some of the most profound are not even in close physical proximity.
I felt so alive and wonderful after spending so much time floating, drifting in stillness.
If you know me, you know I love manatees and whales and sea lions, whale sharks, dolphins….but what I love almost more than an encounter with them is giving them their space and honoring their need for rest and stillness. Cultivating respect for others…accepting their choices to engage or withdraw…and doing the same for myself leads to increased inner harmony and balance.
Wouldn’t it be great if we all could do that for each other and all species? That would perhaps be heaven. For me, it was Blue Heaven.
Once upon a time there lived people in northern Siberia, at the top of the planet in a place we call the North Pole. These people depended on reindeer for their lives. The antlered animals provided clothing, housing materials, wares, tools from bones and antlers, milk and even transportation. The Northern Tungusic people, known as the Evenki, even rode reindeer. But maybe….it wasn’t so long ago.
Like many tribal societies worldwide, theirs was a shamanic culture. A shaman is one who knows or sees and takes journeys of flight through altered states of consciousness to gather information and wisdom. Those who practice a more modern form of shamanism today use the drum beat to alter their state of consciousness but traditional shaman often used psychoactive plants as a way to induce heightened states of awareness.
Shaman are keen observers of nature. The Evenki shaman watched their beloved reindeer’s behavior after eating the fly agaric mushroom and realized there were psychoactive properties in the fungi. They began using a dried version to enhance their journeys of expanded awareness as the fresh version is toxic to humans…poor guy that learned that.
One of the side-effects of ingesting fly agaric is the sensation of flying. Another is seeing others fly, including reindeer. The shamanic journey is a flight of the spirit to non-ordinary reality so the Evenki men and women that took their spirit flights journeyed with ‘flying’ reindeer.
Their spirit journeys were not about escaping reality or getting high. Instead, they used the journey to seek wisdom and knowledge and to honor the spirits, animals, plants and the natural world that gave them life. By connecting with the spiritual aspect of their world, they gathered information that helped them learn when to hunt, when to gather, when to move to other locations and how to treat illness of body and soul.
Shamanic cultures know the magical and mystical properties of the natural world by living in close affiliation with nature. In this way they maintain balance and harmony with the environment that supports and nurtures them.
We don’t need to ingest toxic mushrooms to take flights of spirit. We can use meditation, drumming and even sitting in stillness and silence to enhance our ability to shift our consciousness. Never before has it seemed so urgent that we connect with nature and alter our mindset and cluttered consciousness so that we might learn, once again, how to live in harmony with our planet.
The flying reindeer remind me to connect with nature in a sacred way every day and allow my imagination to take flight and envision a world where we once again live in harmony with nature and all life. And then to take steps every day to engage in helping that vision come to pass.
Buddy and I begin our walk at dusk–that time when darkness starts to overtake light, when the mysteries of night begin to unfold. I glance ahead and see The Owl. She’s on the ground picking at some morsel. When she lifts off, her wingspan fills the air with silent majesty.
We know her. She lives and hunts in the trees surrounding our home. She has watched us before as we amble under green branches reaching toward the heavens. We have watched her.
She is more tolerant of us this day and flies onto a nearby limb. We move forward slowly, Buddy responding to my ‘shuuuu’ and finger to lips by crouching down and freezing. It’s a move we often practice with squirrels and birds.
We creep up and see her looking into the woods. We freeze. She turns and looks our way and then makes eye contact with me and is unashamed to stare–with her big, round, dark eyes–straight through me, to the other side.
She glances back to the woods, unconcerned about the black and white canine and his human.
Several rounds of watching for dinner and watching us occur until she sees something of interest and flies to the ground, grabs it and eats it. A large insect perhaps. Then she lifts those massive, sturdy wings once more and finds another branch on which to perch.
Buddy follows her with his eyes, then looks at me. We crouch down and slowly move forward. This time we are much closer to her chosen tree. More staring at me, my soul…making eye contact with her eyes that appear as pools of black liquid…gateways into the Unknown.
The intense, heart-opening yoga practice I just completed has opened me and I let her in, expose the vulnerable core. She doesn’t look away…for a very long time. Neither do I.
The moment eventually breaks. We turn and leave the woods to her and her hunt. Buddy wonders where his box turtle friend has been this week. I am hesitant to inform him that the turtle might have been a guest at the Owl’s banquet. Years ago I came upon a red-tailed hawk eating a turtle. I thought that was impossible.
Birds of prey remind me that everything is possible when my intention is strong and I am willing to see into the darkness to seek the light.
I heard the phrase, pretty work, echoing in my fatigued brain as I was crawling into bed at 1am. It was a busy night on the beach. My life coach has used the phrase for as long as I can remember.
What a night!! But this was last week, the night before Hermine brought us high tides and surf….and nothing else. But that’s for later in this tale.
Nest B25 was ready to tarp and I went as a tarp helper and to take photographs of sky and waves. I helped dig the trench and release 17 babies from the previous night that had been in ICU. Magic. Beautiful sea turtle magic.
I was leaving because the nest wasn’t that busy, it was my third night in a row of sea turtle work and three other women were there. But just as I got to the car, my friend got a call that babies were under a house nearby.
Cathy and I ran and met Jan and another seasoned team member. Tourists had found them every freaking where. We didn’t know the source of the turtles. I was putting them in my shirt (basket made from shirt) and they were tickling my belly. We were finding turtles almost to the road. Cathy and I found about 14. Jan found some. Jim did as well. Tourists put about 50 in the water. I tracked and tracked and finally found the nest. Just a little sink hole in the sand almost at waters edge with high surf. I helped Jan excavate it and we had almost a complete boil. And every turtle was within three or four feet of water and they went to house lights. We figure 70 made it to the water.
Stop a moment and think about that. The hatchlings were only a very short distance from the Gulf of Mexico and they chose to go to lights under houses, street lights….every single track went away from the water towards lights…or death. If the tourists had not found them and helped us we would have possibly never known the nest hatched due to rising water from Hermine.
The nest had been marked as a false crawl earlier in the season. That mama surprised us with her ability to conceal her nest among her tracks.
We were leaving that wild experience and got a call that Ken monitoring another nest had turtles emerging. The three of us ran down to B24 and helped oversee the babies journey to the sea. The tide was coming up high. Really high. We broke down part of trench after they boiled due to tide and waves.
The next morning brought heartache. I arrived by 6.30am to help with B22 which was flooded. Two teammates and I found 61 perfectly healthy hatchlings with their egg sac completely absorbed (meaning they were ready to swim into the Gulf). Unfortunately they had drowned. We had permission to excavate the nest due to the impending flood and the sounds that had been heard for two to three days prior to the storm (meaning they had hatched and had not emerged from the nest). It was determined that we could wait until the next morning….but it was too late.
We know that every turtle counts when a threatened species is involved so a loss like this hurts deeply. And we potentially lost eight nests due to flooding and erosion from the storm…the storm that wasn’t even close to us and produced maybe three drops of rain here. Only three of our remaining eleven nests remained dry and unaffected by the storm. That’s just in our 3 mile stretch of Laguna Key team’s beach.
It has been a record year for sea turtles across the southeast. At the beginning of the season, when we knew the female loggerheads were about to break Alabama’s record, I suspected we would have a storm. Somehow they know.. the mother turtles know. Of course that’s antidotal and biologists might scoff at the connection. But even in just the five season’s I’ve been a sea turtle volunteer I’ve noticed this trend.
The day of the storm was exhausting…emotionally and physically. After four hours sleep from the previous night’s wild goings-on, the excavation of the drowned hatchlings and another team member and I surveying a section of beach for nest damage…and getting ‘lost’ due to the rising tide and waves…I was ready to rest. We all were.
Searching for hatchlings in a flooded nest.
So many people compliment the work we do. It’s work of our hearts. Not everyone on the team participates at the same level due to work commitments, time constraints or simply lower interest levels. But those of us who are there no matter what, who lose sleep and exhaust ourselves, who wade through nasty, foamy water to dig out dead hatchlings as the waves wash underneath….who get screamed at by local homeowners who can’t grasp the need to walk near their property to access the beach….we cry, we laugh, we save sea turtles, we lose sea turtles….those that stick with it and dedicate themselves to these precious sea friends…we do pretty work. Even though it’s not always pretty.
So great is the darkness the only way I can see the hatchlings is to rest on my hands and knees. The moist sand, illuminated with phosphorescence, mirrors bright stars overhead.
The waves are rolling long. Just as two baby loggerheads find water, a wave washes far, far on to the beach and envelopes me with warm, salty water. I freeze, watching carefully for the tiny beings, small dark spots on this dark night. They find their way to the sea and I relax and feel myself connected….with all life.
Working with sea turtles brings me back to rhythms of sea and shore, light and darkness. They challenge me to find balance within myself, with nature…the cosmos.
In Three Sisters Spring, a highly-visited spring in central Florida by manatees and people watching manatees, there are areas set aside as sanctuaries for resting manatees. Humans are not allowed to follow them past the barriers and the manatees know this. They head to these quiet places to rest and seek respite from the colder river.
I totally understand their desire to hide from massive amounts of people in this ‘warm’ water haven. In fact, I have often wanted to request a sanctuary for humans that simply want to float in stillness and quiet rather than be among those kicking, splashing, talking, yelling or crowding manatees….where is my sanctuary?
Earlier this week I found it. Two days in a row I had the spring to myself. Well….there were fish and a cormorant and maybe a sleeping manatee but there were no other humans. I floated face down watching the spring bubble up 15 feet below me and dropped into a deep stillness that comes when I’m in water, in my happy place.
Suspended weightlessly, the spring and I were one. There was nothing except those moments of harmony. What a time of renewal, of restoration.
If you know me, you know I love manatees and whales and sea lions, whale sharks, dolphins….but what I love almost more than an encounter with them is giving them their space and honoring their need for rest and stillness. Cultivating respect for others…accepting their choices to engage or withdraw…and doing the same for myself leads to increased inner harmony and balance.
Wouldn’t it be great if we all could do that for each other and all species? That would perhaps be heaven. For me, it was Blue Heaven.
