…. yep… no more sleeps to go before I am off on my 50th birthday present to myself….. swimming with the whales in Tonga!!! One of the few places in the world where humans can respectfully swim in the ocean with these amazing creatures. This is highly regulated and there are very strict guidelines, and only 3 of us in the ocean at any time. I will post some photographs and perhaps some words when I get the opportunity.

I booked this wonderful journey nearly a year ago. One of the requirements was to ‘get fit’ which I embarked upon six months ago! … and now I am on my way…. how do I feel???

I feel relieved that I managed to cross so many things off my list I had to do before I left……but only now – at the airport have just realised I have left a load of washing in the washing machine. OOPS!

The thought which does keep sneeking in, is wondering whether swimming with the whales will be as profound an experience as swimming with the dolphins in Hawaii in 2002. Other than childbirth; my experience swimming with the dolphins was the most profound experience of my life. I wrote a poem afterwards (below) ,which doesn’t convey one skerrick of how it affected me, but is a reminder of a very meaningful lesson for me.

I learned that no matter how wonderful; profound; enlightening; sublime… etc… that experience was – I had to acknowledge that it was an experience I had for that particular moment or moments in my life.

To wish that I could have it again would keep me in the past and has the potential to close me off to perhaps even more profound experiences… or not? 🙂

To wish wish that something similar would happen with the whales is creating an expectation of my future experience – which is just a bunch of thoughts in my head anyway and isn’t the actual experence of life.

…. so now I feel like I am in wonderful place of being prepared to open myself to a new experience… without comparison or expectation. Actually… to be in this place is quite liberating, and I feel a great sense of freedom by not being restrained by comparison or expectation.

I would like to share the poem I wrote after swimming with the dolphins; just to share with you my experience of the past…. not to hold on to it, just to share an experience. In a few weeks when I return… I may have another poem and photographs to share… or I may not??? Who knows what will happen ??? I’m gald I don’t know – that would spoil the fun and freshness of truly living in experience!!

Dolphin Presence

Azure silence is stroked with sound.

Undulating

arrows from below slide upward along the sun’s golden arms,

intertwining rolling fins

celebrate the joy of radiance manifest in flesh.

Undulating

with threads of resonance,

the dolphins cross and weave casting a net

into which I am carried

in a slipstream,

being soothingly sucked into a knowing.

Pellets of sound rebound

with my own vibration.

A soft belly strokes my neck – communion.

 Undulating

swirling scars on smooth skin – inconsequential,

unencumbered by the shroud of the security from excuses

of what has been.

Dorsal fins greet the surface;

every cetacean breath a conscious choice-

as is the emission of frequencies

which detonate in my cells a world of pyrotechnics,

beyond cognition.

Undulating

observing

Eyes lined with kohl.

A vortex of history- beyond chiselled stone.

A funnel of mirrored walls of memories –

obsolete guideposts.

Undulating

My own being; transmuting-

an infinite formless expansion,

warping in the chasm of timelessness.

Pulsing sonic vibrations

squeezing, twisting echoes,

spiralling through the portals of time.

Messages

encoded on the waves of resonance from Source

emanating into the present

where this vortex around my heart swirls with such power,

expands with such force that my sternum splits

with feelings of reminiscent connections

and a love so pure

that in the luminescence of this swirling abyss –

 All is known,

then, becomes, in one breath expended

yet another frame on the funnelled silver walls of the past,

and as my sternum is healed by the sutures of sound,

my ribs again expand with the splendour of the present.