Image: Raina Gentry
The most delicious underwater dream of the clearest, cleanest water, following a turtle as she swam ahead of me.
The light glowed underneath the water, glimmering on rocks and mosses and the legs and shell of the swimming turtle. A dream of such peace and pleasure, suspended weightless in the water.
Image: Tamara Phillips
On my way home this morning, I stopped in at the local turtle hangout, just to savour the dream, even though the water is cloudy and murky, still it glints and ripples and hints at deliciousness for all the critters living in, on, and around it. Turtles sunbathing on rocks. Ducks by the dozens. A lone blue heron perched atop a tall dead tree. Sparrows and robins and cardinals and yellow finches belting out their morning song so loud I can barely hear whatever is crashing around in the bushes on the other side of the pond.
I’d spent the night on a friend’s couch. We’d been talking into the wee hours about how much of the hokey woo we could each handle. You know, we’d gotten onto the whole Abraham Hicks / Law of Attraction thing, and of course the idea of “channeling” makes my friend recoil, AND, she protested, “the magical thinking”. She’s a rational, educated, hard working woman whose father is a scientist. I totally understand her reaction – if I actually try to think about channeling, it doesn’t speak to anything I understand, really – like what is that exactly?
But I’m trying to stay open-minded. Cause I’ve been finding with some of these things, that if the message is beautiful and can move ideas around in interesting ways, does it matter how it arrives?
Most days I find the Abraham Hicks quotes I get in my inbox engage my mind and attitude in novel ways, however there are some days when it feels like the message of “abundance” is a kind of facile, “Yes, we can all have as many SUV’s as we want, you just need to raise your vibration to get your SUV too”, to which I have a rather negative reaction. You know, just thinking about the planet and turtles and clean water and things.
But I think of my late father-in-law, a highly educated doctor with an anthropological philosphical bent, a Marxist refugee from Papa Doc’s Haiti. He would say of all teachers and teachings, “take what you like and leave the rest”.
To me it feels like that. So last night I was telling my friend about an interview I heard between Wayne Dyer and Abraham Hicks, where Wayne Dyer talks about how for years and years he’d been angry at his father for abandoning him, cause he’d ended up in a series of foster homes and carried his anger with him until the day he went to visit his father’s grave. Abraham Hicks interrupts him and says, “but you chose all of that – you wanted the independence, you didn’t want some father figure around all the time, meddling in your affairs”.
Now of course, the problem is that you’d have to accept not only channeling, but also reincarnation and a kind of immortal soul that makes choices as it comes into a new lifetimes and a whole cluster of beliefs that may or may not be your thing.
And yet…even though I don’t really know if I believe in reincarnation and immortal souls, still I’m drawn to the mindset, because the idea that we choose our experiences is so totally liberating. All notions of victimhood are immediately eradicated, as one becomes the prime director of one’s experience in this lifetime. It is a sensation of freedom and agency perhaps not so different from the feeling in Nietzsche’s phrase, “he who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how“. There is a kind of purposeful light that is bestowed by this thought pattern, regardless of the origin or scientific provability of the thought pattern.
Lately my most favourite “channeled messages” are the Mayan Messages. Again, it’s a “take what you like and leave the rest” kind of relationship – there’s a bunch of things in there I can’t deal with, like UFO’s and stuff that I’m just not ready to think about. But what I love in them is the sense of the planet and the serious political and environmental challenges we face in our time, the need to think about living life simply, consciously, sharing the skills and resources we each have.
In Native American teachings, Turtle is the oldest symbol for planet Earth. It is the personification of goddess energy, and the eternal Mother from which our lives evolve. We are born of the womb of Earth, and to her soil our bodies will return. In honoring the Earth, we are asked by Turtle to be mindful of the cycle of give and take, to give back to the Mother as she has given to us. ~Jamie Sams
Weekly Photo Challenge – Texture
follow your nose 
i don’t say I BELIEVE in reincarnation, but i know by experience it is true, because I remember bits of other lifetimes. not much, but enough to know it is real. I do not care if somebody else believes it or not, except if the idea that they only live once gets them not to care about the earth or even their own children and grandchildren or anybody at all who comes after them.
Terron Dodd
Terron!
Interesting the way you put it – experience knows it to be true, but the mind does not necessarily accept.
I think I have a similar experience of it – there are things I see sometimes, and can’t tell where they are coming from. I may wish them to be the future, but sometimes it seems they are more likely coming from a distant past.
Reincarnation as a belief definitely does seem like it could help people stay invested in the future of the planet, but then, it seems hard for any of us to stay concerned with what’s gonna happen in 10 years, let alone 10 decades or more.
Ah well, in the meantime, gonna go find some clean water to swim in… 🙂
Hi Katalina – this was such an exquisite essay, intertwining nature images, art, symbolism, personal reflections. It really drew me in. The watery reflection pictures are lovely. And I agree with you about this materialistic focus of the law of attraction – that sounds more like black voodoo or wishcraft to me. What I do appreciate about the law of attraction is that if we develop certain qualities within ourselves first, then we naturally attract people who also possess these qualities. Like attracts like, unless you need to attract opposite to still learn important lessons. Thanks again for sharing this lovely post.
Lovely lady, thanks so much for your comment!
Yes, the law of attraction stuff makes sense to me on a kind of vague energetic level, a human connection level, and maybe a kind of emotional experience level – not so much on the “vibrate a new car” front.
Glad you enjoyed the photos. I like hanging out down there with the turtles and the water. 🙂
I LOVE TURTLES… sorry didn’t need to scream that…. This makes me happy. I think I’m just now, at 48, getting to the “take what you like and leave the rest” stage… I don’t have a label or theory to put behind it, but it’s been liberating to say the least. Thank you for writing. And… thank you for your beautiful photos.
Hey Jami.
It can be hard to trust this “take what you like and leave the rest” thing, cause what if the person was a maniac in some part of their private life? Like is it okay to dance to Michael Jackson’s music if he was a child molester? Or to love Jung’s work even if there’s some kind of rumour that floats around about his anti-semitism? People have their dark sides, their contradictions – and that’s just regular humans!
On top of that it seems kind of un-serious to put one’s time and thought into something as un-real-world as ideas that come from channeling, but…it still makes me happy 🙂
Thanks so much for your comment,
Kat
First of all, from Turtles to Abraham Hicks– totally unexpected. My personal experience w/ the law of attraction- raising the vibration counts for a lot, but so does taking the necessary steps to make what u want happen. Love the “dreamtime” wisdom in your words and images, per usual. 🙂
Yah, you know, I like to keep it eclectic 🙂
PS. I read somewhere that the turtle is connected with feminine power.
The Big Mama. Do you know the Haudenosaunee / Iroquois creation myth of Sky Woman who falls through a hole in the sky onto the turtle’s back and they create Turtle Island / North America? Here’s a link – http://www.crystalinks.com/iroquoiscreation.html
Loved reading this. Thank you. Wow.. so different from the Creation story that I grew up with- Adam and Eve.
I think the beauty of turtles in a swamp is a higher vibration than money or a car.
Terron
🙂
When I saw your picture by Tamara (the turtles) I felt a little uneasy. Mine was all ready to go. Here we are in blog-land. As you say, it must be turtle day!
Loved this set of photos, especially the ones of the water and the ripples and all it’s patterns. “the idea that we choose our experiences is so totally liberating” That is so true. When we have the chance to carve our own life ahead of us, the world is at our feet, the world is your oyster. We’re free to express ourselves and be who we want to be. Thanks for sharing 🙂
Oh, thanks so much for your comment, Mabel! Very happy you could relate. 🙂
How gorgeous! colors and the textures! My God the textures that make me want to rake my fingers on the screen and have them feel ripples and bumps, and soft satiny things that my eyes can only tease them with!
and then there is the writing… beautiful work girl. We need this, you know. 🙂
Oh Em. You just stop on by here anytime…
🙂
Aaawww Katalina what a lovely post and photography. I had one of the most amazing experiences this summer swimming with a beautiful old(er) turtle in Koh Tao in Thailand, much like in your dream… I also like how you wrote your thoughts and feelings about things ‘inexplainable’ that sometimes feel or ring true to you. I think that it is once we stop feeling the need to explain everything (i.e. we shut up our rational mind 🙂 ), and we let go of any expectations, that the magic starts revealing itself to us little by little every day. And a whole new world opens up…
I ❤ learning more about turtles, thank you! xox
Mmmmm, thank YOU, m’dear – I appreciate the affirmation of the practice of listening to the not-so-rational mind. Lately I’ve been trying to do it more regularly, and let it go deeper – and it is a hard path to stay true to!
For example I was offered a job, felt unsure, so as I went to bed, I asked my dreams. Then I woke up in the night with the word “warning” ringing in my ears – nothing else, just the word. I tried again, went back to sleep and had a nightmare of muscular metallic spiders. STILL I felt it would be wrong to say no to this job when I had nothing else lined up…so I told them yes, but by then I had dithered so long, they’d found some alternates and told me “no thanks, maybe next time”. Thank GOODNESS!
Hopefully next time I’ll just be able to listen to the perfectly clear and unambiguous messages coming through…LOL
P.S. swimming with turtles in Thailand sounds AMAZING….
Deer have become so commonplace in North America, at least in the Midwest and Eastern U.S. that we don’t see them in the light that you present them in. Thanks! They are one of my favorite animals to watch.
Gosh, I wish I saw them more often… 🙂
Katalina, I live on a heavily traveled road. One day while sitting in my living room, I saw a huge buck. If the window had not been a barrier, the buck was within touch. I never realized how big a deer is until that moment. Once I was taking a walk in the bitter cold of winter, a family of deer kept following me. I guess they were hoping that I’d leave them some food. But their behavior was more similar to that of dogs. Deer are my real friends. Another time my friends and I were walking and we noticed a young deer that appeared trapped within the front playground of an corner elementary school. And then we saw his worried family, on the other side of a busy street. We opened the gate for the deer to get out, but the deer found an exit through the back. We all felt good when we saw the young deer cross the street alone and reunite with its family. I live on the border of a major metropolis. Your appreciation of deer is awesome! L.
Wow! Such interesting encounters…
I once saw deer and elk grazing on the median strip between the 2 halves of a divided highway, with traffic whizzing by on both sides. I live on a dead-end gravel road 5 miles from the nearest paved road and 6 miles from a village of several hundred people. There are about 5 inhabited houses on this road and i see none of them from my house, but miles of woods. I seldom see a deer and only once in years will a few bites be taken out of my garden. one of my daughters lives on the outskirts of a town of about 25,000 people1 1/2 hours drive from here. She has up to 12 deer in her yard in the evening and it is nearly impossible to have a garden there if you don’t have a good, tall fence.
So interesting… so they are finding yummy human gardens a reason to put up with being close to humans…
Well, that can’t be all of it, because they almost never bother my garden. There just aren’t many deer around here.but there are plenty around Sydney. I don’t know why. People are not allowed to shoot them near houses, of course, but few people bother to hunt deer any more in this area, because they are scarce, so i don’t think hunting can be the REASON they’re scarrce. Some say it is the coyotes who have killed them off, but i think the coyotes are found around towns, too. Some say it is because of the vanishing of the farm fields that used to cover so much ground that deer have declined. But the natural food of deer, I think is young trees and bushes, not grass, and there is plenty of that sort of thing. So I can’t tell why it is that deer are so plentiful near town and not in the country.