mindfulness in mahukona

Mahukona docks - photo taken by Emma Finn

 

Sun setting over the ocean, over the sea! Rays on my left shoulder, pivot my head to the right – into the blue towel of a wrapped woman and a silver low-riding Tacoma with two deeper blue barrels in the back, along with two nervous-looking Filipinos. Tent city on a once-kiawe-riddled pali above concrete pilings – Renaissance Faire of orange-blue-green. Slipper-clad kids squeaking along back and forth between the truck and a water spigot – lovely brown faces now beaming from the flat of the bed.

More able now to gaze into the bay (still glimpsed over the same shoulder) – feels too cold for swimming. Paddleboarder seeking limits of the bay. Two good female friends – music of laughter, fellowship. Eyes roaming mindlessly, settling now onto woven plastic covers to county sandbags, child’s slipper, cigarette boxes, men’s XXL tee shirt, perfectly good wheel cover, plastic floor mat, old yard sale signs …

What good, this practice – when garbage juxtaposed against Paradise precipitates anxiety – hot flashes – signal fires from the soul! How to roll along with what Is, instead of being traumatized by veering off the path of illusion I create in my own private world, even if only for a day! (Why can’t we pick up our rubbish? Why is ignorance so predictable?) Yet given these distortions, how to flow swiftly in the known currents, how to leverage them for change … (If this be a dream, why can’t we wake up?)

Mentally voracious – cannot pull it all in. Trying. Regret. Losing boundaries. Life! What I’ve come to know more deeply about myself, about this hunger for grasping what cannot be known: insatiable.

Creator, trickster, master, fool, all in one.

 

image: Peter Zentjens