Going Home from Belize

This will obviously be out of order because writing has to do that sometimes.  If you write by order delineated by time, you could miss the crispness of the current moment.  Picking up pieces from the past to sweep it all together, forces the mind into linear thinking. But, my mind is not like that. It has to be free to roam as it pleases, going back and forth into time and back out of it again. 

In that case, we will start at the present moment, outside of linear time, and then go back to pick up pieces and somehow string them together, I hope in a coherent style.  I am in Dallas Fort Worth airport, looking at the words Palm Springs on the flight departure sign.  I keep looking at it.   I am flying home.  Before this, it was not home.  Nor was the U.S.  I didn’t know where home was in terms of earth plane dwelling.  I was looking for home.  Now I know I am going back home. I look around me. The floors are clean, the walls are clean, when they use the intercom it actually works, no one is trying to copy Americans or the Western way of living, the lights are clear and there are no missing letters in the neon displays, there are no beggars and…this next one needs its own sentence.  Full Stop.   The bathrooms are free of charge; you don’t have to pay to use them.  Well, actually, that sentence above should be in its own paragraph.  Full Stop. 

  It is that important to one who does not have a bladder the size of a camel’s.  Camels make better travelers.  They are just equipped for it and they do not carry their own baggage. They may carry other people’s baggage, but they do not carry their own. I, on the other hand, carried my own baggage.  I mean this literally and figuratively.  I carried too many things and too many internal thoughts that did not serve me.  I went to Belize to show me the details of both and to shed what I could.  Luckily, I come back with all of my things intact save for my salt water laden towel which I left at the Mayan village of San Felipe in the Toledo district, at a small chocolate maker, but that story is for another time.   

The other type of baggage, the internal kind, I have made spiritual intentions to let go in every cave I entered, at every sacred site I have seen, even in taxi cabs, in between telling stories of where I have been and where I don’t want to revisit.  I can say now, with assurance, that I do return to the Palm Springs, California area, with less to carry on the inside.  The same is not with regards to my luggage, but that is also another story.  Traveling does that, if we allow it.  We come back with more things maybe, but hopefully less internal stuff that no longer serves.  All that we no longer need, meaning dead end thoughts and feelings that lead us to ground hog day circles chasing empty dreams to nowhere or rehashing past memories until they are more refined and ground than mashed potatoes, are let go of.  All of those can be let go in one gesture: Get Grateful for What We Have. End of Story.  Full Stop.

But, we often don’t do that. Many times we go on a trip and become thankful for a time, but then return to our habits of taking what we have for granted.  Gratitude is the fastest way to complete and eternal peace.  It can clean out mind debris in one cleansing gentle rain of thanks.  I’d like it to stick this time.  I’d like for all of my prayers to change my neuro-chemical vibration to pure Gratitude, where all of my neuron pathways are lined with the frequency of Gratitude so that all of my blood cells that travel their own course through my body are submerged in the frequency of all that is Good, of all that is Grateful.  Then, once and for all, I can go home internally and rest in peace while I am living. 

I have to admit, I came on this trip thinking I would die.  It’s not that I planned it, but I thought that perhaps it was my time to let go of struggle and I thought maybe death would do it.  I went snorkeling, turning around to see if a shark was my answer, though I didn’t want to go that way.  I got bit by a dog only to find out that the area had a bout with rabies and urged vaccinations a short while back. It hadn’t occurred to me to ask if the dog had been inoculated.  I wondered if that was the way I would go.  But, a hotel manager phoned the owners for me.  Nope, it would not be rabies.  I saw a bug that was called the Kiss of Death, more dangerous than the eight known venomous snakes in Belize and the jaguar put together.  I walked with vampire bats flying around me.  No, it would not be that way either.  The bus drive from Toledo in the south to Belize City to catch an airplane was also a possibility. The driver was skilled in the martial arts of bus driving.  His soul, passion, and whole life story was revealed in his steering wheel techniques.  He was telling his song with his generous honking alleviating his need to scream his plight through words.  His smooth ability to pass like an eel stealing its way into a narrow passage showed his near misses and how he got by in his life. Like many of us sitting on the hot seats of his magic carpet bus, we, too held the strings of our life sometimes by our teeth nearly missing the bite of a good catch.