Meditation for February 6th
The Waves
One of the best meditations is through visualization. You close your eyes and picture what the guide tells you. You try to sense the world around you. Not only are you picturing it, but you are also smelling, hearing, and feeling it. Now let me be the guide as we meditate on the most spiritual places on earth: the sea. Picture in your mind the lapping of the surf on the sandy beach, hear the waves lull you into a trance, feel the sea breeze wash over your skin, and smell the briny sea and the baking sand. Close your eyes…
You are standing on the shore looking out at the sea. You watch the waves rolling onto the sand over and over again. You listen to the surf crash and drift back out to sea before the next wave rolls in. It almost puts you into a trance.
Then, as you are spaced out, a big wave throws a drift log at you, killing you.
As the waves gently drift past your ankles as you wade in the shallow surf, you are surprised by an undertow that drags you out to sea. As you fight for your breath, you see the shoreline getting farther away. Then you pass out and die.
You are laughing as you run away from a rolling line of foam, but you trip on some kelp, and you hit your head on a rock, dashing your brains out.
You are walking down the beach hand in hand with someone special when an undertow pulls them away. You try to swim out and save that person, but that person is in full survival mode and claws and climbs on top of you, causing you to drown and die. That person may or may not have also drowned.
You are standing knee deep when you notice all the sea lions fighting to get back on the rocks. You are then being dragged back out to sea by the mouth of a Great White.
You are standing on the edge of the rocks, looking at the tide pools, when you notice the tide has come in, blocking your way back to the beach. The sun sets, and night brings a rainstorm. You become desperate not to spend the night on these unforgiving rocks, so you jump into the swirling sea to swim back to the beach. Still disoriented by the darkness and the cold, you find yourself swimming in circles before giving up from hypothermia and floating to the bottom of the sea, feeling a warm euphoria as you see mermaids swim towards you.
You are building a sandcastle near the water line when an orca slides up, grabs you, and drags you back into the water while grinding your meat off of your bones.
You stand trying to Instagram the beautiful sunset when Poseidon Himself comes out of the sea and smites you with his trident.
The point is, the sea doesn’t want you to be alive. It wants you to die along with all the other land animals. Life was never supposed to drag itself up on the sand and create god.
Prayer
O’ Neptune,
God of the sea.
Let me never see your son’s locker.
Let me know your strength,
and respect your depths.
O’ Poseidon,
God of the oceans.
Let me not trip on your jellyfish,
find the hugging limbs of a squid,
the gnashing teeth of your children.
O’ Aquaman.
The deep’s favorite son.
Please be my savior,
and call your dolphins, sea turtles, and otters – who are the cutest animals in the WORLD!
To keep me out of harm’s way,
especially if it’s Lex Luther, the Joker, or the Black Manta.
Amen.
Craft
You should move to the coast and open a small shop that sells these items:
Driftwood clock with a lacquered painting of wolves howling in the light.
Driftwood lamp with a lampshade that has the silhouette of a clipper ship.
Signs painted like the turn of the last century that say things like,
Life’s a Beach,
This Way to the Beach,
Life’s Good,
At the Beach,
Gone Fishing.
Paintings of the ocean and the surrounding landscape,
and custom portraits of people’s cats.
Goal
Don’t trust the sea. It is only there to kill you. Even the cutest of animals, the sea otter, will tear your face off if you swim out to them and make kissing noises. The very currents in the sea are only there to take you away from land so that you will drown. The sea is always looking for ways to take more land away. In the Pacific Northwest, they are waiting for a 9.0 on the Richter scale that will alter the coastline in her favor.
Move inland. The mountains are more spiritual.