S
upper’s recurrent conversation stays in my body, despite that it took place several hours ago.
The hot-blooded discussion of various religious beliefs and religions seems, since time began, to engage the human mind. A question of belonging, a fear of anyone else’s God. I laugh quietly.
An ego that wants to interpret what from the beginning was from heart to heart.
My mind analyses, attempts to sort my thoughts. It doesn’t work just now.
The pasta also remains heavily in my body. It seems to fill every internal organ to the brim and pushes on my already busted insides. My tummy sticks out just like Bo’s.
I close my eyes and try to remember something from my actual reality. The one with greater mercifulness. Something safe. Like my mama’s warm embrace.
But an escape to my mind doesn’t work once I’ve seen through these hollow distractions.
To give it my attention seems at that moment like an utter sin.
But something in me still seems to want to bargain with the devil. Something that is outraged by my insights and at the same time is irritated by my human shortcomings.
The same voice. Two sides of the same coin.
The plastic plates clatter against each other down in the galley.
Reggae music crackles from the cracked speakers. The toilet door bangs.
Bo’s water bottle rolls on the table in the cockpit.
The force of the wind increases in time with the darkness descending.
The boat rocks forward, between and under the stars. The moon’s enormous shape at the sea surface seems as unreal as the life I once lived. As unreal as the person I once thought myself to be.
She does not exist now. What is left is only so much life and energy pulsing through the body. A type of infinite love.
The light of the full moon paves a sparkling path down to our sailboat. A dolphin plays in the silvery water. The magic of this beauty drops onto my hand. A tear forms a drop that remains between sinewy knuckles. The light from the sea makes the salt bubble glitter.
Nora comes up and sits beside me. She has her extra jacket with her that she puts over my shoulders. She presents the palm of her hand and our hands meet.
“Magic, the full moon looks illusively large right now, deceptive in a way.”
She laughs and appears to feel the same pulsating energy inside her.
“Yes, it all looks to be a big illusion just now.”
I grow quiet as I realise I’m talking about something I was told as a child to not speak of.
I speak of something that questions the human mind’s false security structures and our self-created perceptions and self-images.
Much can be questioned, curiosity can be encouraged to a point, but only so far as that which is within its framework is considered legitimate. Only as long as it doesn’t threaten anything we humans deem valuable or even necessary to preserve – ego.
In this case it is best to keep quiet so as to not fall outside those human patterns considered to be ‘normal’.
“What do you mean?”
I sense a familiar apprehension behind her question.
“I mean I experience such a strong feeling of beginning to see more clearly ‘beyond’ my measly human sense. As if I have completely lost the notion of who I am, at the same time as I have never felt more like me in all my life!”
I laugh.
“I don’t get it.”
Her warm brown eyes wear a feeling of security that attracts me.
"I understand that you don’t! I don’t get it myself. All I know is that a seed has been planted deep within me. I water and nourish this seed with my attention. This seed is God’s seed. Each of us has this seed with us because it contains and is the potential to what we are.
“Sometimes I wish that it hadn’t grown in just this body. That it remained latent within somewhere and was overlooked by my attention and presence. But I know that is simply the devil’s or ego’s voice speaking when I have such thoughts.”
I breathe in the fresh, moist night air and breathe out what I just said which was not in resonance with my heart.
She spreads her jacket on the deck and indicates with her hand that I should lie down. I lay on the edge and show there is place for her, too.
We fall asleep close beside one another. Our bodies warm each other under the jacket I’ve borrowed from her.
We swim side by side alongside the whale’s enormous body. Weightless we float, all three, among the stars and an immense moon.
The space within is the only thing present when the morning light reaches Nora’s face.
I feel her warm breath on my cheek. She opens her eyes and considers me. Her lips brush mine.
“Forgive me, Val.”
She sits up, draws her hand through her hair, puts her cap on her head and gets up.
I take her hand before she goes.
“I’ll help you with breakfast,” I say and try to appear as if no sense of embarrassment exists over what just happened between us.
She nods, goes to the wash station and splashes her face with saltwater a few times.
The form of the moon is only faintly seen in the sky.
Like a white, round cloud that can be dissolved completely by the light at any time.
The light gets its seductive, illusory form to appear insignificant, hardly existing.
A transformation from its form’s illusion. To the authenticity of formlessness.
From ego to conscious presence.