Don’t you get tired of strategizing, of lining everything up and figuring it out?
Its how we’ve been taught; make a plan and stick to it! Check off the steps one, two three… (four, five, five hundred!)
Success is defined in a thousand books about how how how…
B-ooooring!
Its a LOT more fun to just show up!
Of course it helps to have an idea of where you want to go, but…
Doesn’t your heart already have that? I mean really, do you have to contemplate what you, in your heart, really want to do?
(Yes, that was a trick question)
I love just showing up… I’m doing it more and more in my life, and it ROCKS!
This, another fish story, is a prime example…
(If you cannot see the video, click here)
Tags: bimini, fishing, fun, joy, mutton snapper, nature, not knowing, ocean, spontaneous, unknown
Once upon a time, if someone had told me that my thoughts and feeling actually created my world, I would’ve told them they were nuts.
After both simple and profound experiences of exactly that, (what experiences you ask? Read the book) (remember to insert book link here once its printed) I’ve come to the conclusion that either yes, my beliefs affect not just my interpretation of the world, but actually dictate how it assembles itself into form…
Either that or I’m nuts!
If I’m nuts, I’m a pecan. (Hey, if I’m the author, I get to choose!)
OK, now I’m an almond! (I also get to change my mind… )
Now I’m a macadamia! (I love Hawaii!)
Don’t we all get to choose what we think, to change our mind whenever we want or are inspired to?
Which brings up the question; what are you choosing?
(PS: I’m a mango!)
Our collective thoughts profoundly influence our world, much more than we realize…
Its quite a beautiful world, don’t you think? ;)
(Another ‘Just for Fun’ post)
Jen and I had a blast with the latest group to come to Bimini. It was composed mostly of her long time friends and clients, another Canadian contingency from Toronto.
We had one swim with a mom and calf that was memorable… part of what made it so memorable is Jeannie doing her first ‘dolphin-assisted’ freedive!
She’d been practicing all week , building upon her freediving skills from last year’s trip. This girl was determined to spiral down into the deep blue with the dolphins, and you can feel her joy as she literally ‘dove in’ and got her chance!
(She’s the one with the red shirt and yellow fins)
Jeannie’s been bribing me with the promise of homemade chocolate brownies to send her this video, so she can show it to her twin five-year-old boys. Can you imagine the look on their faces as they watch their mommy swimming to the ocean floor with a wild and crazy dolphin calf? (insert brownie here, Jeannie).
I put this video to music. The song, ‘Wave after Wave’ is from the CD with the same name by a good friend of mine, Charley Thweatt. I first heard his music many years ago (before my first gray hair) and have enjoyed it since. We finally met at a health food store in Maui, (I asked him about his cool ‘Taco’ t-shirt, Taco as in that feisty little chi-wow-wa) and discovered that we were roommates at the ‘WhaleQuest’ conference we were both presenting at. Charley’s music has its own unique joyful authenticity, I hope you enjoy it.
Hey, why not watch it like a 5 year old?
Sending you LOVE from the Ocean!
Joe
(If you cannot see the video, click here)
This gulf oil spill, its quite an activating event! I’m discovering some pretty powerful gifts its giving me…
I love presenting a point of view that advocates staying in love rather than fear or anger. This stance has elicited a lot of responses! (How dare I send love to the perpetrators!)
Someone just sent me a video of a remote tribe in India whose God, a sacred mountain, is about to be bulldozed by an international company for its minerals… More proof of how greedy ‘they’ are…
I started watching, felt a surge of righteous indignation well up from with me, as big as that mountain! Those damn corporations!
Then I remember (again) that there is no ‘other’… the greed out there reflects the greed within me. Instead of judging and condemning them, I turn to the greed and fear within myself…
What is greed other than the fear of not enough?
As I turn within, as I shift my attention from ‘out there’ to ‘in here’, I immediately feel myself start to soften…
I hold the greed and anger and fear as I held my own son when he was upset and angry, when he was sad and scared… I hold this part of me with gentleness and compassion, and feel an upwelling of love, waves of love from a greater place within…
There is no ‘other’… the corporations, the greed and anger and fear, its all ours… In owning it as ours, we can heal it.
Thank you for reflecting the vast magical array of our humanness to me!
In Love,
Joe
I’m tired of the doomsday news… I feel like a yo-yo… Up, down, up, down…
Was talking with my friend Amlas about how important it is to stay loving and how easy it is to get re-stimulated. All this mess inspires me to go within and start cleaning up the one spill I can clean… My own.
So I went out in my rubber raft and started cleaning… took the entire gulf, the entire planet, into my belly and loved it…
We live in a quantum world, we are all One… the spill ‘out there’ is quite simply a mirror of the spill ‘in here’…
Yes, the spill within us all…
Yahoo! We can do something about that! ;)
Have fun!
(If you cannot see the video, click here)
I was swimming with these two dolphins who kept ‘high fiving’ each other…. I laughed thru my snorkel!
It was so cool to see… they were slapping their pectoral fins back and forth like a couple of kids… the joy of their play was contagious!
I got it all on film… check it out and let me know if it leaves YOU smiling too!!!
(If you cannot see the video, click here)
Tags: Bahamas, bimini, diving, dolphins, high five, joy, nature, ocean, pec, play, swimming with dolphins, wild
Life is fleeting, as I was reminded 2 nights ago. Jen and I were motoring my new rubber boat back from an awesome dolphin swim (prior post) and we saw some red and blue lights flashing up ahead. I dropped her off at the beach ( a shortcut for her – she always gets the first shower!) and I headed south to the inlet.
The closer I got to the flashing lights, the more surreal it got… there was a large crowd standing on the edge of a bluff overlooking the beach were I teach my groups how to snorkel, (the exact spot I wrote about 3 posts ago).
The small Australian pines above the bluff were black, scorched and smoking… there were pieces of metal strewn along the beach… What was going on???
My friend Al was in his boat surveying the scene… he told me that a small plane had crashed barely an hour before, and the wreckage in the water 20 feet in front of us was the remains of the plane.
On a small island like Bimini, news travels fast. Bad news, even faster. What is our fascination with bad news, with death?
The pilot (from Nassau) and his passenger, a woman from Bimini, were both killed, their bodies already recovered. (Whew). A 2 year old boy and his mother, sitting on the beach, our beach, had received some 1st and 2nd degree burns from ignited fuel falling from the plane. The plane had cartwheeled right over them and into the sea at their feet. It also cartwheeled over a cottages I sometimes use for my groups.
WTF?
I took some photos and motored home in the dark, contemplating. That night, Jen and I rode our bikes downtown. The south end of town was in darkness… the plane had torn out the high tension lines, the cause of his crash. I saw Bonefish Tommy, he gave me a first hand account of what happened…
Many people know this pilot as he has a habit of buzzing the beach with his plane after takeoff. Tommy was on Weech’s dock and saw the plane dip down close to the harbor, almost hitting the navigational light in the middle of the harbor (this pole is less than 20 feet tall). He said the plane swerved up and turned, but caught the high tension lines on the low road (the Queen’s road), then roared off towards the beach. He described the loud ‘whoosh’ he heard from the crash seconds later.
Why am I writing the whole story, I ask myself… I was just going to write a synapsis of our fascination with death…
We rode our bikes up the to high road (100 feet away, Bimini is a skinny island) and found pieces of wreckage still along the road and on the beach. Power lines, the ones that tore the wing off, went from the road into the sea, where the plane rested…
People called the guy a fool, and the woman with him an innocent victim. One friend said she was 4 months pregnant. So now we’re up to three deaths. For a joy ride.
She already had a booked flight to Freeport, but she traded it in for a free ride with the pilot. That trade cost her life.
Its easy to judge, (this guy’s a jerk!) But I know there is no accidents in life, we die when our spirit is good and ready, not before, not after. So these two spirits (three?) knew it was time, and they chose a dramatic exit. Why?
Its for each of us to decide… For me, its a reminder that life is finite and to enjoy it. And that we have a fascination with death, which I have judged, yet now I understand.
Taking pictures of the wreckage, I thought about this post. I was in a prime spot to ‘get the scoop’. Smoldering photos, live interviews with eye witnesses, carnage strewn about; some pretty impressive stuff from a place I love.
But (and yes, I’m using ‘but’ deliberately here! ;) I made a clear choice awhile ago to go easy on the pain button and live happily in the yes/pleasure/purpose side of life.
And yes, curiosity, even morbid curiosity, tempted me to claim a piece of the plane too. WTF? What kind of prize is that?
Maybe our fascination with death reminds us to be alive, to stay alive, to appreciate life in general. This incident sure does that for me.
Tags: bimini plane crash, death, morbid curiosity, plane
In the face of the Gulf oil spill, what would the Dolphins want us to know?
I have prayed about this, and 2 days ago I went out into the ocean and asked them… This is what I heard them say… What do they say to you?
If you cannot see the video, click here
You are a powerhouse of Light. You are a Light unto the world.
The Gulf Oil Spill is stirring up lots of feelings. People are angry, hurt and sad. Some are rageful, some depressed. On a vibrational scale, there is a lot of misery, very little light.
Was this done deliberately? Is BP making it worse with their spraying of dispersants? Is there a political/other hidden agenda? Just learned that British Petroleum has not let any independant observers in to quantify exactly how much oil is pouring forth. Why not? What are they hiding?
Also learned that a typical response to a runaway oil well leak is to dynamite it shut. Its been done many times before… You mean this could have been dynamited weeks ago and it hasn’t???
A friend sent me a photo of a dolphin raising its oil-covered head from out of the slick… I got nauseated and angry.
Read someone’s rageful blast of hate on Facebook, asked them to stop being polarized and send love instead. (What we resist, persists) They directed their rage at me. Hmmmm…
What is the highest course of action here? Lobby Obama, boycott BP, get friggin pissed and rageful?
Then the gentle quiet voice within us all invites me to relax… to breath… to soften. It reminds me to stay calm and centered and loving, and to send Light to the situation.
I’ve done hundreds of water ceremonies with thousands of people. The power of our love is infinite. How could I forget this? The gentle voice responds to my request for inspired action with this:
Send the Gulf of Mexico your Light,
Blast your LIGHT to the whole area;
To the people, the well, the oceans, the plants and birds and sealife and fish and dolphins and whales,
Send the whole region your LIGHT!
Join me in sending them our light.
Tags: bp, dolphins, gulf, gulf oil spill, healing, light, ocean, oil, spill
The ocean can be a scary place… I used to have nightmares of sinking in it as a kid. Its BIG and DEEP and full of weird stuff including SHARKS!!!
(Scared yet? ;)
The ocean is also a place of fathomless beauty and wonder… a place we go to to be baptized and reborn.
A few weeks ago I taught half this group how to snorkel. Some were strong swimmers, some didn’t know how to swim, and some were scared of the ocean. It was the beginning of a five day dolphin trip that Jen and I were leading. Day one is ‘get friendly with the water’ day, and its one of my favorite.
These brave adventurers brought their brand new masks, snorkels and fins into the water. After showing them how to adjust and wear them, they each got coached in putting their face into the water and breathing thru their snorkel. Not an easy feat! Putting your face IN the water and inhaling is counter-intuitive. It takes a bit of practice and a lot of trust.
Then, once everyone’s floating comfortably face down on the surface, I taught them each how to to do a surface dive.
Yup, virgin first-time beginner snorkelers learning how to freedive – it was awesome to behold how their excitement lead them thru their fear.
The whole thing took less than two hours… Like learning to ride a bike, now they have a skill for life! I get so inspired watching people overcome their fears, I’m often moved to tears. (I’m sure it was the salt water… ;)
Twenty years ago, I taught my former mother-in-law how to snorkel… she was scared but was curious to see what we were so interested in. I remember getting her to float on the surface of the ocean and keeping her face in the water… it took a few minutes, but then she got the hang of it…
Then the magic ensued…
She stopped thinking about the snorkel and began to notice the fish life at her feet… Watching her from a few feet away, I could feel the shift… she began swimming slowly along the shoreline, following the nooks and crannies of the rocks, and for the next fifteen minutes, didn’t lift her head out of the water once…
And when she did, she was radiant! The same radiance I saw on these friend’s faces – the beautiful innocent look of wonder…
I’ve seen this happen so many times; once people get a glimpse of life under the sea, they become enraptured.
The very next day, our group of first time snorkelers were swimming and playing off the back of a boat in forty feet of crystal clear blue water with the wild dolphins; they were ecstatic!
Take on something new; it will open your horizons.
And we swam with the dolphins!
Tags: Bahamas, bimini, dolphins, ocean, snorkeling, swimming, wild dolphins