Each new moon I ask my guides for a story to help me navigate the month ahead. Often it’s an attitude that’s called for, a positioning of awareness within the larger context, as is the case with the message for the New Moon on January 13th (scroll down below). In that story, small sailboats were skimming about in the bay on a bright summer’s day. Then the wind dropped and completely disappeared. We visited a few of the boats to see how each crew’s reaction to the same circumstances affected the sense of the situation.
March’s post continues the story, which concludes with this month’s message:
It was the terror that stayed with them, that had transformed into exhilaration and awe when the wind had taken over, and that had seared itself into them. Even far from the shore, it continued to bring the sea alive as a constant background presence into their land-locked daily round.
The shark encounter became the defining event of their lives, a before-and-after line. Their lives had been saved in a larger sense, also – saved from the trivial. Lives no longer flat and un-illuminated because behind them lay this shimmering mystery that cast their activities in relief by its light.
Those boats that had refused the aid of the sharks were towed to shore by the coastguard. Their skippers never returned to sea again, except for one, who, on the contrary, took to sailing obsessively in those same waters in the hopes of reclaiming a missed opportunity, willing that circumstances might repeat, so this time they would overcome their fear and seize the chance to be towed into the wind by a shark.
Those who had been saved by the sharks knew such a thing would likely never happen to them again, but it did not need to. From then on, possibility shone at the side of their lives like an open door, always accessible, expanding, by its mere existence, their context.
As the sharks entered the realm of lore and legend, the fishermen and pleasure boaters venturing on the sea came to regard them with extraordinary respect. Scientists could never verify, of course, nor explain the sharks’ Samaritan behavior, but looking back, they cannot deny what a sea change in human behavior it brought about.