Energy surfing is a term I coined to explain what it is that we are experiencing when we meet, connect and build friendships and relationships with each other on line.  I’ve written about this a lot because how can you help but not “feel” the energy that is transpiring between you and another person via the simple medium of electronics…whatever electronics you are using to communicate.

It’s hard to explain to someone what that feeling of energy surfing is if they’re not already open to the many ways that we humans experience energy already.  I had quite a back and forth conversation with one of the people who responded to a similar topic I had posted asked on LinkedIn. Where he was coming from, if I understood him correctly, was that the energy that I was talking about feeling was coming from me and my perceptions.  Granted, he had a point because we’re always at the mercy of our own perceptions and feelings but what I was unable to communicate to him was that intangible connection-energy that can happen on-line with two or more people that is a partnership of energies.

Let it be said too, that when I first began heavily using email communication back and forth I stumbled into some not so fun exchanges with family members and close friends because of what was being lost in the written communication.  During one such exchange several years ago, my husband had to tell me over and over again to STOP EMAILING WITH THAT PERSON. Nothing was going to get resolved in our gritty, jerky email exchanges.  What I wonder now is if what I was experiencing was another dimension of feeling the energy of a particular family dynamic that has always been around—in action.  Brrrr, like the little snow man would say when telling the story of Rudolf the Red-nosed Reindeer.

With time, I’ve learned how to catch a wave of the emotions of myself and others as I write back and forth on LinkedIn, FaceBook, blogging and various social media communiques.   One of the fascinating aspects of gaining confidence of the intuitive abilities that I have always known is that with more connections and dare I say, shhh, ….love…., that I feel I am less inclined to need some of the kinds of attention that I used to pine for from others to let me know that I am alright.  Insert major flights of anxiety and low self esteem here.

Sure, lots of therapy and recovery from addictions and all kinds of spiritual spelunking has helped me to mature, there’s no doubt about that. But what I’m talking about is finally feeling like what used to be this bottomless pit inside of unmet needs, is being met.  Last night I went to the Texas Book Festival Authors’ Party with my good friend Nettie Reynolds of the Hartsock Agency which was held at the ab fab home of Eddie Safady.  All I had to drink was sparkling water and I felt so at home among the writers.  I didn’t feel less than because I haven’t published my book yet (which I am writing now!) and so enjoyed mingling and connecting with some of my writer friends who I really have gotten to know better because of chatting back and forth on Facebook.

I have to say though, even with all the great energy surfing that I am experiencing today I still am not at the mercy of my cellphone or the computer. I get on and “mingle in the spheres” when I want to and get off and enjoy my reality on this holodeck that I call my life today.   That’s probably one of the keys to being able to energy surf is to be able to rest up from it and restore your energy between surfs.

Do you notice the energy going on around you today?  If you surf it, how do you catch a good wave?

A few years back when I was a technical recruiter, we’d get a few consultants who had been around for awhile and weren’t keen on giving away much information on themselves. One guy refused to give out his social security number.   At that time, I remember having empathy for them and respect for their privacy but I didn’t think much more about it. Except, of course, when their requests hindered me from being able to do my job (like turn in paperwork to prove they were U.S. Citizens, etc.) and then I thought of them as pains in my glutemous.

It rained most of the day today which gave my hubby and I a great reason to hunker down and watch movies. One of them was “Erasing David“  which is documentary about privacy, surveillance and the database state.   Having grown up in a household with a father who had a job with, shall we say, “the government”….I felt that the main character of the documentary sure did a lousy job of trying not to be found for 30 days (he was found after 18).  For one thing, he threw away basic documents such as bus and train tickets that any good investigator would find after going through his trash.

The documentary did ask a good question to make us ponder about just how much information we put out there on a daily basis that can be used to invade our privacy.  Not to mention how we live fairly transparent lives in the online world where many of us ignore the fact that people, artificial intelligence, and search engines are collecting all kinds of data on us all the time and storing it for future use.  Hope I’m not making you paranoid but rather helping you to think about what kind of information you’re giving and who is using it.

As much as I want to be recognized for my writing and things I do to try to help make this world a better place, there is also a part of me who understands how vulnerable we all are by revealing so much of ourselves and hoping for the best.  I’m grateful we didn’t have access to the internet, texting or social networks when I was younger because I know I would have left very inappropriate blueprints of myself all over the place. Besides, it did my soul good to find relief by staring at the clouds floating by overhead instead of texting or dropping down the rabbit hole to find relief from my teenage anxt.

Anyway, as you can see the paranoid side of my brain got stimulated today!  I do have just a little bit more empathy for friends of mine who live very public lives and crave their privacy, especially those who are married to spouses who scramble for the spotlight.

If you could get lost and go anyplace in the world today, where would you go and why? (hypothetically speaking of course!)

Asking the unseen for help, oy vey.  We’ve been trying to tell each other what that means since we found the  ability to communicate.  Some call it faith, some call it wishing, some call it accessing your inner voice, still others call it asking for help from forces/guides/angels/ancestors that we cannot see.  For me, it’s pieces and and a combination of all of that plus the added belief that there may also be an untapped part of our brains that is only accessed by directly asking “it” for help.  Similarly to thinking of our brain as being a computer such as Hal on 2001 Space Odyssey or the computer on Star Trek

I’ve been trying a new technique at night if I wake up and begin thinking/ruminating on something that needs to be handled instead of laying awake for hours, I  ask my guides for support and further request that the answers be given to me subconsciously or unconsciously and revealed to me in dreams or upon awakening. So far it’s worked like a champ to get me back to sleep fairly quickly.

I learned from my friend, Shannon Ogg–who is a channeler, healer and Reikki Master, to ask for my “whole team” when I’m asking for help.  I’m finding that the unseen help seems to be activated by having a strong belief that help is always there and all we have to do is ask.  But we also need to take actions to helping ourselves as well.  I ask for help all the time about all kinds of things.  Some of my requests are as basic as asking for help in resolving a problem on my computer.  For instance, I’ve created this part time job of selling my friend Kim’s gorgeous lighting (Illuminaries Lighting) which is made right here in our fair city of Austin, Texas.  It has taken me weeks to admit that the very simple task of forwarding emails to me from the illuminaries email address to my gmail address is overwhelming.  Part of my brain could not admit that I could not grasp the basics of getting the password, popmail etc. done.  So, I asked for help from the unseen  And what I got was a very calm voice in my head instructing me on what to do from how to open up my email and get into the account settings to then, once I was there, calling the tech support guy to ask one more time for what I needed to do.   Finally, today I was able to follow through with the instructions and now am receiving forwarded emails from my illuminaries account.

As with many things in this life curriculum, the first step is to admit that we need help.  Seems really simple doesn’t it?  Well, I don’t know about you but for me sometimes it is actually the really simple things that I need help with that feel so impossible to admit.  Give me the big stuff like car problems or needing a ride to the doctor and I can ask for help.  But give me something that I think I “should” know how to do or grasp the instructions right off the bat and it might take me quite a long time before it occurs to me that perhaps asking for help is a good solution.

As much as we think we know about the human brain and how it works, we are still so new at it.  I’ve been told by, heard or read by many teachers, masters and prophets that the human being is really one of the (if not “the”) most incredible beings that has ever been created.  For many years I balked at that idea because I didn’t like the way many people said that out of one side of their mouths and then treated people, nature and the planet out of the other side.  It has only dawned on me recently that perhaps a fully self-realized human being would be one who would interact with all life respectfully and in harmony.

That idea opens up all kinds of possibilities for the unseen helping us along our journey to waking up.

How will you ask the unseen for help?

Warning, the blogger writing this post has a mind filled with conversations and information from Political Science class this afternoon!

On my very first day in boarding school at the tender young age of 15, I walked into my room with Pink Floyd’s “Us and Them” blaring from my room mate’s stereo.  That was the fall of 1973 and the song continued to follow me along my journey at the Academy.  Here it is a few decades later and this song popped into my head again while hearing the Poli-Sci Professor explain the “definition of poverty” and the disagreement and definitions between the Liberals and the Conservatives.

I realized again that “we” are getting all caught up in the us vs. them syndrome again.  For instance, it was said that “liberals talked about the near poor, those who would be in poverty without some kind of governmental benefit and the conservatives say that “the poverty rate only takes into account income and not assets such as cars, homes, etc.  Then we talked about welfare and for the first time since this class began, a number of students began to talk.  Some of the students had some pretty grounded opinions but others seemed to be parroting what they had been fed. At least, I remember that was how I was when I first began college lo those many years ago. I respected my father so much that I never stopped to consider how I really felt about what was going on around me politically nor cared to learn what it all meant.  So glad I’m in a different place about it today!

There’s examples of us vs. them all around us, we humans seem to know how to pit ourselves against each other really well.  Must be some kind of reptilian brain response to step out of the egg and on to someone’s head before they can do it to us.  But in the real scheme of things, in growing and expanding our beings as much as we possibly can…isn’t it really about listening to each other and finding a common ground to then find a way to work together better?  For example, there is someone who I’ve had long and involved conversations about Global Warming.  I realized soon into our first conversations that this person was very hot under the collar about what they believed (there is no such thing as Global Warming) and so no matter what I said to them, they were not going to “hear” (or care to hear) my point of view.  So, I had to step out of my own opinion about Global Warming and look at the bigger picture…set aside the labels.  I asked this person if they could agree that the major ice caps were melting (yes) and could they agree that Texas is experiencing a horrific drought (yes) and could the agree that the North and East seems to be having harsher winters (yes)…so then we could both walk in agreement towards finding solutions of how to either help heal or prevent the situations.

Let go of the labels.  Lean forward into understanding.

It’s not about us vs. them, actually it’s about the we.  Who can you lean forward into understanding better?

Shine on you crazy diamond!

Shine on you crazy diamond!!

Because you just might get it!  Haven’t you heard that before? As if prayer could be some kind of a threat to us?  I don’t believe that; however, what I do believe is that when we pray (and by pray that can mean very different things to many people from praying to the g-d of your understanding to a higher source to the voice within you to the great unknown, etc.) you set up an alignment of your energy with all kinds of combined energies which can then call things forward (to you) in your life.

What made me think of this is a discussion that we had tonight in Janet Conner’s “Plug in for Expressive Souls” class about finding and removing blocks to your creative soul.  Much discussion was made about various techniques/prayers/etc. that can be used to help remove those blocks including the very powerful, ho’oponopono prayer that comes from the belief that you (each of us) are 100% responsible for what comes into our lives.  That’s a very big pill for many to swallow.  That word “responsible” does mean so many different things to us and is charged with all kinds of meaning and emotion depending on how it has been used and abused by us/to us in our lives.

For me, being 100% responsible for what is brought into my life feels so much lighter than it felt a couple of decades ago and I believe that is because I’ve let go of a whole lot of beliefs (very co-dependent beliefs that I was responsible for everything and everyone) that were not serving me. Now you may be asking, “how can you be 100% responsible for what is brought into your life and let go of being responsible for everything and everyone?  It’s a control thing.  The only person that I can change is me.  The only thoughts that I can alter are mine.  There is a great release that happens for me today when I am able to say, “thank you” to every situation and person (mentally or out loud).  Now, this morning when I drove around the little squashed up parking lot at TXST for over an hour looking for a freaking parking place and some new little person who had just driven into the lot sped past me really quickly to score a parking place of someone who was walking to their car—I wish ho’oponopono was the first thing that had come out of my mouth…. and it is exactly the thing that would have helped to relax my heart and send that driver good energy to boot but what I said were some pretty colorful phrases that I’m glad no one could hear!  I did end up reclaiming the words I said in the privacy of my own little car and blessing the woman a few minutes later, so there’s that!

Sometimes it is not all fairies and sunbeams when we say ho’oponopono, at least not immediately. Like the time I was coming home late from a meeting and rolled past a stop sign in our neighborhood when out of the blue came the local sheriff who was young enough to be my son all resplendent in his freshly washed and ironed uniform.  I was nice and polite to him and admitted I’d run the stop sign (but it was 10:00pm and nary a human was about) handed over my driver’s license and paperwork and began to say “I love you, please forgive me, I’m sorry and thank you” over and over and over til he came back to the car and very politely admonished me for running the stop sign and to be careful yadee yadee yadda as he handed over the ticket for me to sign for $350.

Yes, the entire 3 minutes after that it took me to drive the rest of the way to my home I was fuming!??  I fumed the rest of the evening until bedtime when I did my meditation and prayers and asked for understanding.  Well the next morning don’t you know that I got my answer when I realized as I drove to the first intersection with stop signs that for quite awhile I had been rolling past that stop sign with just an ever so tepid stop before moving along through the intersection (that is in the middle of a steep hill by the way) and I knew that ticket was my wake up call. That ticket probably saved my life as well as someone else.

So, when I said the ho’oponopono words I was hoping for “warning” in the form of words without money involved but what I got was something that would for sure make me pay attention.  Wasn’t what I’d hoped for but actually was what I prayed for…help.

What about you? How deep are you willing to go with the understanding of your answered prayers today?

accepting responsibility....

Like right now for instance. Even if you’re just about to crawl into bed and go to sleep…you can start your day over.

During a great “My dinner with Andre” lunch with a good friend today among our topics of divorce, grief, depression, little life tests and more was the realization of how we write “stories” in our minds about what is going on sometimes without any investigation or research to see if our creations are valid.  As luck would have it, we’re also both writers so the fact that we create stories about pretty much everything in our lives guarantees that we will never run out of material to write about.

But it did get us to thinking.

What little worlds had we created out of the very thin air in our minds that we had no idea we had created AND were walking around reacting and responding to as if they were the truth?! Such as, for example, in my past if something negative were to happen to me first thing in the morning (and it could be something as simple as stubbing my toe on the edge of the bed frame) then that was a set up for my creating all kinds of other negative things to support the story that my day sucked.  All I really had to do was acknowledge that I had stubbed my toe possibly because I was still half asleep and not paying attention to where I was placing my feet AND that I could sit down on the edge of my bed (after I had done the jump around dance holding on to my foot routine), take a deep breath and start my day over. So simple yet so disregarded.

This morning I headed off to school earlier than usual so that I could take a test that I had missed while on vacation.  Where we had to take the test was in a different building from the class with a simply amazing number of stairs to take from outside to inside until you reached the class.  Now, I could have made up a whole lot of stories about how this day was going simply based on the fact that I still have a sore foot from a full tank of oxygen falling on it a few days ago and that I was having to walk up several flights of stairs to take a test….but instead I gave myself permission to take my sweet time climbing the stairs and then crammed with some fellow students while waiting for the Professor.  Somehow my morning was almost fun.

You can start your day over anytime if you need to do so, but are you willing?

And you thought you were having a bad day!!

Stuck in a rut? Tired of doing the same ole routine day after day?  Find a way to get away from it all and travel.  Where there is a will, there is a way.  Right now I’m sitting on the balcony of our hotel looking at another incredible Mexican sunset.  There is rain off in the distance on the mainland and underneath the cumulus clouds on the horizon is a very faint patch of clouds which are  outlined in rose.  All of these clouds, of course, are hanging over the beautiful Caribbean Sea.

We had another great day of diving and spotted 8 or 9 Sea Horses! Yay!! Finally got to see them in their habitat.  And these guys were big!! I’m talking at least an inch or more!  So beautiful with their arched necks hanging out with their looped tails on a blade of grass.

Seahorse in Cozumel

We also so a puffer fish when we were sailing over the grasses looking for Seahorses who was such a funny beastie.  He hung around really still at first as if he was saying, “you can’t see me, I’m not here..”

Puffer Fish

New ways of thinking are coming into my consciousness because my usual ruts of thinking have been changed by all the new sites, sounds, and people that I am seeing and experiencing. Right now the last rays of the setting sun are bursting through the clouds making big wide blue and white streaks that reminds me of the Northern Lights.  It’s easy to forget what I thought was so important last week when I was worried about how to bring in more income.

So grateful for travel and for friends who we love and enjoy enough to travel to experience all kinds of places.

How will you discover new ways of thinking for yourself?

Male Seahorses are the ones who carry the eggs...

Unless you’ve been hiding out under a bush, you’ve probably read or heard about the wild fires that have been raging across Texas since early summer.  This past Labor Day weekend, those of us who live in Central Texas witnessed or experienced huge fires from Steiner Ranch to Pedernales Falls to Bastrop.  Some are still going on as I type this.  I love us Texans because we are a group of people who can really rally the troops when all hell breaks lose.  Already this morning every news station I turned to on the radio was giving out information of donation drops that had been organized overnight to help the victims of the fires as well as the men and women who are out there fighting the fires.

Having been born into a family that tends to go for the gusto when it comes to helping people in disastrous situations, my DNA began to thrum with questions of how I could best be of help, especially for the animals involved.  I had all kinds of ideas running through my head from going to help out a friend of mine’s mother-in-law who had lost her ranch, but rescued all her horses and in-door pets, to helping a fellow FB friend who had a lot of animals that she had to evacuate because of a fire.  No clear answer was coming to me, but I kept praying.

I puttered around doing my morning chores and put the garden hose into the pool to fill it up a bit turning  the nozzle lever off on the sprinkler attachment so that the water would come out of the regular spout and returned to finish reading the paper and my first cup of coffee.  Soon after I sat down the dogs’ curious movements outside the window caught my attention.  Our old Black Lab was in her high alert stance with all the hackles up on her back as she trotted to and fro on her toes and our Aussie was running back and forth along the edge of the pool with his nose close to the ground. At first, I mistakenly assumed that somehow the sprinkler attachment lever had been flipped and so they were getting excited because of the rigorous spray of water but then as I looked longer I could see that the commotion in the pool wasn’t just located at the end of the hose but was moving towards the other end of the pool.

And then I saw her.  A beautiful Morning Dove who had some how landed in the pool and was frantically trying to fly out of it with her very wet wings.  I corralled the dogs into the kitchen and returned to carefully rescue the startled Dove.   With both hands I gently cupped her up out of the water (and kissed her head to let her know I wasn’t going to eat her) and put her over near the water bowls where the birds gather to drink.  She sat on the edge of the fence very still. Something (was she communicating with me?) was letting me know that this Dove’s preference was for me to let her alone in a safe place outside so that she could gather herself after such a terrifying event.  I went back inside to retrieve a towel so that I could put it down on the fence for her to sit on while she dried off in the cool morning air but when I returned with the towel, I startled her so that she jumped off the fence.  She could only flutter on the ground  so I carefully cupped her and brought her back up to lay her on the towel in a  little Mourning Dove huddle.  I looked out the window every five minutes or so but she didn’t move a feather as far as I could tell and I’ve watched a lot of birds in my life.

All during this time, I kept battling between  the still knowing  inside of me that knew the best action to take was to leave her alone  so that she could use her own Dove wisdom to heal and that frantic insecure voice that says, “you should bring her inside and put her in a box and get her seed/water and gravel -n- grit….”.  Finally, at about twenty minutes later I want outside to check on her and as I opened the door she took off upwards and across our yard with a strong healthy flight.   Turns out, the still knowing was right.

I also believe my prayers about what to do for the animals effected by the fires was answered on the wing of a Dove.  I was reminded by a friend that many animals and birds have been savagely uprooted from their homes and will be flying and running to new territories all over the place. I know that one of the best actions I can take is to help those animals that come to our home.  Just before I got into the shower today, I looked out the bathroom window to see several Finches hanging and talking on their seed sock and right next to that Cardinals and other song birds hanging on their feeder and across the way doves and squirrels gathered around their feeders. On our porch were several families of Hummingbirds flitting around the feeders and a Cardinal was taking his morning dip in a watering bowl.  They all seemed happy and content which is always a good feeling for me when I can assist any living being in feeling happy and content.

How about you?  How have you received answers to the questions coming from your heart and head?

Mourning Doves

I confess that I have been known to check my email and FB on my phone when stopped at a light or while sitting in my car waiting in line but I’m starting to realize that I’m slowly falling into that hole of wanting to look down at my phone instead of engaging in the world around me.  I can’t tell you the number of people I see looking down at their phones as they walk in-between classes at school.  No chance of ever making eye contact there.  But then maybe that’s the point.

Still, I wonder what senses we’re slowly eroding away by not paying attention to what’s going on in our environment when we dive into playing with our phones.  There’s that biological theory that eventually we won’t be born with an appendix since we don’t use them anymore.  What senses might we lose by not using them?  I have noticed that more and more of the people I know have a harder time remembering names, events, dates, numbers…you name it. And it turns out that it’s not just people my age, or hormones or gender.  All kinds of people are having trouble with their memory.  Is it because we’re moving so fast that there are only so many byte spaces in our brain and we can’t hold anything more in them? Or are we quickly evolving to GOOGLING when we want an answer?  Or….are our brain waves being effected by all the technology using various waves to communicate?  There’s an article by David Dalka that would suggest so.  The good news is that there are many scientists working on this now according to a recent BBC New Article.

I’m grateful that I can enjoy a walk through our neighborhood and see all kinds of things going on that I might miss if I was staring at my phone such as  the beautiful Nighthawks soaring at dusk or one of our neighbor’s old dogs getting excited at seeing Paul coming up her street and that somehow, in spite of the horrendous drought we’re experiencing right now and the extremely hot summer there are some trees along our walking route that are sprouting fresh green leaves. I don’t know where they are finding the energy and resources for new buds….but they’re finding them.

On our morning walk today, there was a huge Harlequin Great Dane galumping back and forth across the street and a young girl with her dog on a leash frantically trying to keep her dog from attacking the Dane. Meanwhile, David was concerned that our little macho man would do the same thing. Luckily, I’d been raised with two Danes in my life so I know this one was just looking for fun (and that even though he was huge, he was still a puppy).  He came right to me when I called him and the little girl told me he lived in a house nearby. Sure enough, his home had the front door open and I called into see if anyone was home (they were so Dane and Master were reunited!).  I did help the Dane narrowly escape a nipping for his escapades but unfortunately there was not enough time for me to give him a thorough patting so that I could enjoy his exuberant energy.   If I’d been looking down at my phone, I could have missed so many cues from the little girl wanting to walk her dog on without the Dane, to the fact that she knew the Dane and knew where he lived to finally recognizing that he was a young pup in a big boy body and didn’t mean any harm.

So, when you’re out walking around put your phone in your pocket and take in what’s going on around you, you just might miss something important!

Great Danes playing!

Over the years much ado has been made about the groups of people we share our lives with and many books have been written with one of my favorites being “Tribes” by Seth Godin. I also like what Max DePree has to say about tribes in his book, “Leadership as an Art”.In the chapter, “Tribal Storytelling”, Max talks about “the penalty for failing to listen to (the tribal storytelling of your “tribe” or company) is to lose one’s history, one’s historical context, one’s binding values” and that “without the continuity brought by custom, any group of people will begin to forget who they are”.

We are really fortunate in our family to have several really good storytellers amongst us.  There are several stories that my parents will tell again and again of their growing up years (or of  my brothers and me) that I have never grown tired of hearing. Because we all live pretty far apart (except for one brother who is residing in Texas for a short while) when we get together the first thing we do is lapse into storytelling as a way to remind ourselves where we came from and what we share with each other.  There is one story I love of my brother when he was 9 and I was 11. My parents had been divorced for just a short while and my mom, brother and I had moved to a house out in the country.  It was the late sixties and so many things were changing fast. Dad was preparing to go to Viet Nam as a fighter pilot and mom was trying her wings at being a self-realized woman for the first time in her life.  One afternoon in particular, my mom, her friend and my brother and I along with our three shepherds were returning from the park.  My brother was sitting in the way back of our Buick station wagon (avocado green of course!) with the dogs. He was one of those skinny kids who was all feet, knees and elbows and because we both have huge heads with big brown eyes, all you could see amongst the flying fur of the dogs was his knobby knees and big blonde head.  At some point the song du jour came on, “I am woman” by Helen Reddy.  I think my brother had experienced just about enough changes in my mom with her wearing blue jean jackets instead of skirts and trying to smoke cigarettes (I say trying because she’s always been a health nut and she sure didn’t seem to know how to smoke a cigarette like the other adults!).  Anyway,  all of a sudden my brother belted out in his little soprano–cracking–alto voice, “I am man” where of course Helen sings, “I am woman” and we all cracked up laughing.  It was funny and poignant and marked a certain time of change in all our lives.

When I get together with friends who I many not have seen in a while, such as boarding school mates, we also swap stories of adventures and misadventures we experienced together way back when.  Everyone has moved all around the world, have families and different lives from that time but after a short time of telling stories we are reminded about the binding history that we share.  One group of friends who I’ve known for 20+ years always tells the story of the weekend the men who had gone away for a camping trip survived a huge tornado and how one of them took the time to cook up some bacon in the middle of all hell breaking lose.  Same with another group of close friends who my husband and I have traveled with and gone on many scuba diving adventures together.  Some of my favorite images conjured when swapping stories with that group is the one of all 9 of us renting mopeds to take a ride around the island of Cozumel.  We all felt so cool wearing our helmets and riding like the wind on our mopeds around the island.  We even had magical moments like when we stopped at Bob’s Marley Bar

Storytelling in song, dance and word

(before the hurricane that shredded it to pieces so that they rebuilt it) and they had exactly 9 hammocks for all of us to lounge in as we drank beer and listened to reggae.   Our friend Tony dubbed our group, “Antonio’s Angels” even though there were two other men in our outfit!! We still laugh at how much fun we had and how slick we all thought we were even though pretty much everyone who can afford transportation on the island drives a moped!

So next time you are with your tribe or one of the groups of people you would call a tribe, listen to what stories are being told and pay attention to the ones that are familiar.  There’s more being told then just a story.