Antenna

by Jenny Wonderling

I met one of the cutest kids I ever have on the beach today. Maybe four years old, his black hair was shorn short, except for one long braid that erupted from his head like a floppy antenna. When he saw me he immediately exclaimed “bonjour!” then blew me a kiss and wrapped his gleaming dark eyes around my heart. Laughing, he flashed strong white teeth, and squealed as he threw his wiry body sloppily into the sea. He soon exploded out of the water, hands outstretched towards the sun and sky, twirling, splashing, and descending. Again and again. And again, throwing in some kicks, new moves and tumbles for good measure. He had no shovels or buckets. And in the many hours I watched him playing, he never once called his parents for a single need to be satisfied. I had never seen an American child so self-sufficient.

He was wild and joyous, his muscular body sprinting and jumping in every direction like a little firecracker. I could have spent all day playing with him. Yet I never did. Both of us were perfectly content in our own experiences, exploring the water, finding treasures below, feeling the sun’s warmth. No one else played with him either. Still, maybe it comforted us both to know the other was there, not too far off.

It was shocking how someone so small could contain so much joy. Every once in a while he flashed his contagious smile in my direction, pouring what felt like a profound and palpable capacity for love into me. He entertained himself literally wanting for nothing, occupied by his own adventures in a swath of a few square feet at the edge of the ocean. Far off from where he was, his smiling dad and pregnant mom were deep in the water, holding one another or floating at a distance while speaking in quiet voices in French Creole. They seemed connected to each other and the elements, keeping a relaxed eye on their boy, and on me with my differences.

Later, a little tour boat pulled right up to the sand, blaring music as it does every day. Tourists with beet red skin and bright swimsuits disembarked, stumbling or dancing their way up the beach. It was clear they’d had fun and were still in a party mood, thanks to the dark skinned men on boat who were razzing each guest warmly as they said “au revoir” and “merci.”

Reggaeton continued pumping while the men tidied up, collecting bottles, washing the boat, howling with laughter. Then they started chatting it up with the couple in the water who were soon laughing too. I could appreciate how much fun everyone else seemed to be having. I’ll admit it, though, I had been really enjoying floating in a quiet world before the boat arrived, the peace of it all, wrapped in the sounds of the birds, wind and sweet sounds of the little diver, like little bells.

Was I just getting old and too used to the quiet life? I told myself the sun was feeling too strong to stay much longer. I mean how much peace should one human be indulged, anyhow? I waved at my young friend as I headed to my sarong where I would wait for the sun to dry me. 

I lay there pondering about how the Vava Voom felt as invasive to me as all the other motor boats that blast music and speed right next to where people are swimming or lounging on the shore every day. It not only felt unsafe and reckless, I was concerned about the fact that right under the water’s surface a whole coral reef was brittle and visibly gray or white, few fish swimming in the shallows. Surely the boats must have had an impact there too.

Forgive them for they know not what they do.

I dried my hands, pulled out my book and tried to read. Music kept pumping while the men collected bottles and washed the boat, still guffawing, hamming it up.

And yet…an edge of an awareness began to ignite inside me…

If how they’re living is with love and celebration, what if that also offers important healing for the world in spite of things? Of course ideally, joy and consciousness will meet each other in continuous ways one day soon. I hope unequivocally that as a global collective, we will learn how to leave a trail of goodness instead of what we too often do. In fact, I know the survival and thrival of All Our Relations depends on it.

Meanwhile, however thoughtfully I try to live, I am no more superior than anyone else.

My own impact is reprehensible as well. Besides driving, and heating my home with fossil fuels and more, I have flown to the other side of the world yet again, In fact, I am writing about interactions on a beach in Mauritius, a 24+ hours flight from the Hudson Valley where I live. It doesn’t take much digging to read that a “Boeing 747 uses approximately 4 litres [of fuel] every second, which translates to 240 litres per minute and 14,400 litre per hour. For a 13-hour flight from Tokyo to New York City, Boeing 747 might burn 187,200 litres.”

The truth is, we all play our part- the beauty and the shadow.

While the men worked on the boat at the shore, they started chatting it up with the couple in the water, soon laughing too.

Reading would have to wait. I sprawled out and closed my eyes. After a few moments I was able to focus on the sun’s loving touch, inviting the music to find its way into me too, to remind me of the fun everyone deserves to have. The trees above me were tossing their green heads; even they seemed to be telling me there’s a time for dancing.

Can we hold ourselves responsible without judgment or the judgment of others? Can we accept that we should change what and where we can without causing violence through our thoughts? Can we become aware of an imbalance, yet still fully enjoy the present moment with utter gratitude?

The music actually started to sound really good. Suddenly I was moving my hips and feet just a little, while laying supine. I need to dance more, I decided. If I was more brazen and spontaneous, I would dance right here and now, alone on the sand, flow even better with what life has to offer.

I also would have accepted the bottle of beer that the boy’s dad so generously pantomimed for me to have, a silent acknowledgment of what he witnessed had passed between his son and me.

But I just smiled and shook my head, waving my hand and mouthing, “No, merci.”

He smiled back with his warm eyes, but looked confused. Why would someone refuse generosity? Stand in the way of a loving gesture?

Yes, but why?

I don’t really like beer, was my first unspoken excuse. Besides, I have already decided to leave.

Yet I stayed as planted as a palm tree, taking in the scene, staying separate from it. I closed my eyes or perched myself on my elbows, but it didn’t take me long to regret not honoring his offer.

Someone once told me once that it is not our perceived “sins” we are and will be judged for, but what we judge ourselves for in the end. The questions will be most importantly be, “Where and when did we thwart love? When have we stood in its way?”

The boat kept the party going and another round of beers was passed, including to the young boy’s mother who was still steeped in the water, the ocean embracing her swollen belly. I’d be a hypocrite to judge an occasional beer or glass of wine while pregnant. I did the same- though getting through even half a glass or bottle of anything has been a feat for me at any time. Meanwhile, plenty of cultures like France, Spain and Italy have long done the same, and produced much happier populations than our fear mongering America. It wasn’t the beer she held that alarmed me.

It was the cigarette I noticed in her other hand, which she then brought to her lips, when not swigging from the bottle.

I instantly felt heartbroken. How can someone knowingly harm their unborn child—for at this point, how can anyone not know the damage cigarettes inflict? Judgement was rearing its head again. How could she be so selfish?

The woman seemed to be looking right at me way up on the beach, as if she could feel my arrogance. Extravagantly, she exhaled a cloud of smoke, boring her eyes into my soul. She seemed to have something important to impart to me. Pay attention, girl, she seemed to be saying.

Just then, her little angel twirled and arced at the shore, smiling bright as the sun, spraying water in all directions.

Nicotine exposure or whatever else, he was indeed a spectacular specimen of someone truly alive and joyous.

He is a product of me. He is me, she told me through her gaze.

And I am the other you.

Her gaze and all it conveyed, made me think of the Mayan greeting, In lak'ech ala K'in, which people routinely use to greet and honor one another in the Yucatan, stranger and friend alike. “I am you and you are me,” they say each time they see each other at the market, on the road, at school. My mind then drifted to other such salutations I have been touched by first-hand while traveling on other continents, quotidienne reminders that we are not separate from each other, or from the interconnectedness of all life. Namaste is another such incantation, meaning The God in me sees the God in You. Used all across India’s population of 1.4 billion people as a greeting and farewell in invokes something subtle and simultaneously powerful since words do in fact shape our thoughts and world. Each time it is uttered, hands in prayer at the heart to embody the merging and balance of the masculine and feminine, it is reaffirmed that we carry our temples within us, each of us sacred.

Dr. Kelly Jennings, a friend in the Hudson Valley, recently wrote about the Hawaiian expression, Aloha, how it means “I share my breath of life with you.” This beautiful expression is a daily nudge to remember how, as she wrote, “Our aliveness is shared and universal.” In the same passage, Dr. Jennings honored the phrase Mitakuye Oyasin, the Lakota prayer and reminder of our oneness, loosely translated as All My Relations. “When we say this outloud, we’re declaring and remembering the awareness of the unseen bonds that are already linking us.” Dr. Jennings explained. “It creates belonging.”

But in the West, we too often forget our shared humanity, the magic that weaves the seen and unseen, and our essential relationships with the earth and natural world. We have a tendency to focus instead on our separateness, on what we should fear in one another, who is better, or worse. Not held by elders or a lineage of belonging and ritual, we only sometimes we remember. But then have amnesia all over again. Clearly I forget too. When I do, I tell myself it’s not completely my fault. I’ve been orphaned from those deeper connections and the awareness that life is indeed a ceremony. And I scramble once again, like so many others, to heal and re-member.

My attention turned back to family on the beach, their apparent ease and joy.

By contrast, in the US we have a lot to say about what’s “right” according to our Western society, only to end up with children, mothers, and family members, as well as our water and soils, and other life forms harmed in overt and subtle ways. And as much as we try to influence the world at large with our culture’s ideals and ways, sadly in the US, “more than 2.7 million children and adolescents are currently living with severe major depression,” according to a 2023 report. And that’s “just” our kids. Clearly what we’re preaching isn’t working.

Aspects of our culture considered normal, healthy and “good for us” and them started flashing in my mind. Things we “just need to accept” as part of our modern world, yet that encourage the commodification of our earth mama’s generous gifts. Or ignore that as a collective we have abused and destroyed too many of her habitats and creatures in the name of “progress.” And we continue to.

One after the other, like nefarious clouds, other evidence of our unconsciousness flashed across my mind’s inner sky in no particular order:

  • RoundUp/Glyphosate and Atrazine sprayed copiously on lawns, school grounds, and the things we eat and put on our bodies, in spite of well-documented deleterious health and environmental impacts.

  • Dulled eyed children inundated by gadgets and screen time.

  • New mothers sent home from the hospital with free care packs that include chemical laden formula while telling them “breast is best.”

  • 10 different vaccines jabbed into babies before the age of 15 months. And that is just the beginning of the schedule.

  • Day care centers for newborns where children as young as 6 weeks are not only not with a primary care giver, but those familial, loving relationships are often replaced by videos and devices to keep the babies calm.

  • 45.15% of births in Miami are C-section, scheduled and otherwise, not inviting women to know the profound strength of her own body and its processes, or the support and sense of the sacred that a birth can offer. And our nationwide average is also abysmal.

  • In 2018 over 300,000 breast augmentation procedures alone were performed and the numb er is rising. In so doing, the areola and milk ducts are also severed, usually interfering with a woman’s ability to breast feed, not to mention the health risks of anesthesia and implants.

And that was just a quick brain splatter. (Oh, there’s more, but I will refrain and add a couple in a P.S.* at the end of this blog).

Here is a fitting quote from J. Krishnamurti which also came to mind though: “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” Indeed.

I hope the boy’s mother will forgive me.

Meanwhile, I have learned to forgive myself, again, and again as I fumble through (and delight in) my life’s journey, along with whole of our human family which holds a limitless capacity for true beauty, yet too often moves with unconsciousness. This, in spite of the fact that archaic and modern Homo Sapiens have been experiencing this precious planet for some 300,000 years. That is a LONG time to figure out how to get “it” right. And wrong.

For now, I can only start with myself, being evermore mindful about the environment, as kind and compassionate as I can, judging less, both within and without. I work to stay humble and authentic, to write from the heart, true to my intuition, committed to weaving nourishing community. To live by and consider what Robin Wall Kimmerer has so nobly brought attention to as the “Honorable Harvest” in all I do and impact. And again, I get things right, and I stumble.

Do not judge, lest ye be judged, I reminded myself as I gathered my things and waved goodbye to the family who were now close to one another, hands on warm skin, at the shore.

Mitakuye Oyasin I said silently, hoping the wind would carry my love to them as strongly as I felt theirs. Then I picked up a few bottles and some other stranded items as I headed up the beach and down the road.

“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”

―J. Krishnamurti

P.S.* Here are a couple more of my free associative regrets about our society.

Jenny Wonderling4 Comments