“Who are those women?” I wondered to myself, “They look like they’d be dating Russian Oligarchs…” It wasn’t just their legginess or bone structure, but they were also speaking a combination of German and some eastern European language that I couldn’t understand. There were three of them, nymph like, in this verdant wonderland, romping, literally romping, through wildflowers that looked as though God had pressed the saturate button too high to be believable anymore. They weren’t dressed scantily, but at 50F, the shorts and spaghetti straps didn’t make sense to someone like me, who in contrast was wearing long underwear, a base layer, and a sweatshirt.
I was parked along the shoulder of Highway 1 in Big Sur. A thick fog had rolled in and I was doing my best to keep a positive attitude. It felt almost comical to be driving the most beautiful highway in America, a 90-mile 2 lane, cliff hugging, hairpin turning, stretch of road from the Hearst Castle to Monterey in the fog. But, as I wrote about in my last post, I’ve been working on living in the moment, and enjoying the path, not just dreaming about the destination. Stopping to enjoy the wildflowers seemed like a perfect way to live out this new realization.
It was after I’d already been there 10 minutes that the women emerged. No, that doesn’t capture the amount of energy right. (Exploded, perhaps?) One of the women exploded from car into (and over) the flowers, yelling (yes yelling) in a foreign tongue for what I assumed was one of the other women to take her picture.
My feelings on the subject were mixed. On the one hand, they were beautiful women. And as a man sometimes my brain suggests I defer to a beautiful woman more than perhaps I should. On the other hand, as a photographer, conservationist, and an old soul – they were destroying the flowers!
My mind formed a win-win solution. Perhaps I could ask if all three of them wanted a photo, and then subtly move them out of the flowers while I did so. The strategy worked, and before I knew it we were deep in conversation and taking photos not just in one place, but many. After a few more moments, we decided to find a restaurant and wait out the fog together there.
By the time we got to a restaurant five miles down the road, the fog had started to lift to the point where it was now sunny overhead, but the coast below was still obscured. We found a table outside, and I rearranged the chairs to put them all under an umbrella’s shade.
Despite coming in the same car, the three women appeared one by one. The first was Polish, and working in Germany. She had dark, straight shoulder’s length hair, and the face of eastern European model (stern, not overly warm, but clearly possessing a keen intellect behind penetrating eyes). She carried herself like someone who knows she is beautiful, and is used to getting her way. She exuded a barely concealed impatience, but more deeply also a romantic’s heart. After a few moments of awkward conversation, she apologized half-heartedly, turned her back to me, moved her chair out of the shade, closed her eyes, stretched her body long, and sunned herself in silence.
While she was doing so, the second woman, arrived. She was born and raised in Germany. The most warmly dressed of the three, she had long brown hair, tucked into her ears. She had a warm smile and a steady kind gaze, which she never broke as she spoke to you. If the first woman carried herself like a model, this woman carried herself like the daughter of an old-world aristocrat. Perhaps the family dacha had been lost, but her mother had still bestowed upon her grace in movement and manners.
And then there was the third. Men have struggled to find words to contain women like her for as long as men have had words – at times she would have been called a sorcerer, a siren, a mystic, a heretic, or a witch. Born in Brazil to a philosopher father who died when she was only 18, I could never piece together how she’d spent the prior 12 years except to say that’d been spent in the company of both the destitute, the super wealthy, and the eccentric – just in the past year it seemed as though she’d lived for a time on a yacht in Oslo, in an artist’s commune in Southern California, and also in the poshest neighborhoods of Munich where she’d met her Model-esque friend. If the Model projected her power through her reserved expressions and subtle movements, this third woman, the Mystic, cast her spells with largeness. She wore new age jewelry you might buy in Sante Fe, clothes perfect for the beach in Rio, hair down below her waist, and a smile that was so sure of itself and its power over you that it made you feel as though you’d entered into a conspiracy with her just by catching her eye.
Once the Mystic arrived the other two girls deferred to her conversational lead. She was also on a year-long journey, she was writing a screenplay, she imagined someday she’d open a store front to be a part-time fortune teller too. “My brain is always moving, moving. Seeing the connections between people, plants, things, energies. I wish I could turn it off, but it never stops.” Perhaps this does not strike you yet, but I’ve heard this type of line before. I knew inevitably we were moving toward more mystical musings, and so I wasn’t surprised when a few moments later she was telling us with upmost seriousness how in her visions she’s seen that she’s opened up a portal of energy that frightened her. She didn’t know whether, or how, to close it, but she’d been trying to, and she’d felt the doing was inviting great suffering to her, including a near fatal auto accident a year prior. Then, in what seemed a random turn, she said, “I’ve seen where I come from.”
A rigorous scientific education, and a lifetime spent on the conventional achievement path doesn’t exactly prepare you to sit across from someone who believes she is a mystic. It prepares to dismiss such people and their claims outright. I’ve learned to analyze, to categorize, to probability weight, and to invalidate scientifically unverifiable statements. I assure you that never once during an investment committee meeting at any prior job did subjects of incarnational theology, mystical visions, or alternative dimensions come up, even in jest.
But, the businessman is only one part of me. Before moving to New York, I seriously considered pursuing a PhD in the critical study of religions. Setting aside the truth of religious claims (e.g. a virgin birth, a voice on the mountaintop, reincarnation, or visions in the desert), there are deep interpersonal, emotional, and human truths to learn in listening carefully to the ineffable and infalsifiable beliefs of others; and of all those beliefs, the most interesting to me are the most fantastical, the most mystical. I’ve often wondered: how can someone straddle both this conventional world and the world of unknowing without falling utterly into madness?
And so, I prodded further, eager to understand what she’d seen. Similar to people who have had near death experiences and come back reporting having been outside their body looking down at what transpired below, a common mystical experience I’ve read about is people in trance who report going back in time in their minds and seeing their births. Whether hallucination, insanity, or truth, I don’t particularly care. If the seer believes the vision and it changes how they live now, I want to listen.
“Did you see your birth?” The mystic paused for the first time. The other girls giggled. “Go on.” The model said in a half-annoyed tone, “You’ll never see him again. Just say it.”
“Not exactly.”
“Then what exactly?”
“I realized I’m not … from here.”
“Like… earth?”
She giggled, and nodded. She told me she is an Indigo — possessing a human body and an otherworldly soul. I checked her face to see if she was joking, but she wasn’t. She went on to explain that she believes Indigos are born to human parents, but their spirits are not human. Indigos send theirs spirit to earth to be born into human form in order to bring greater consciousness and connections to a hurting world trapped in endless cycles of violence and destruction. “Everything in the universe is connected. We do not see it. But chaos and destruction in one place can bring suffering and disorder even far away to those who never knew the source of their pain.”
“I’m not alone in this,” she went on. “There are many of us, and I’m finding more and more.”
She looked at me, and after a pregnant pause, with a twinkle in her eye she asked, “Don’t you know? You are one too.”
For you, my more conventional readers (which are nearly all of you), at this point, I struggle to even imagine what you are thinking. This woman must be crazy! Why were you still sitting there? What were you thinking? Have you gone crazy too?
I do not believe we live in a post truth world. There are facts over which we can come to shared conclusions. It is right for us to make decisions in politics and science based on verifiable facts. But there are other realms of knowing for which we will always be dependent on faith alone, and here we must have humility to realize that many of the common beliefs about God, the saints, Allah, and the Buddha are based on more tradition, but no more proof than her belief in aliens. After all, if there were verifiable proof, these questions would no longer be issues of faith but science.
I do not write this to argue for the veracity of her beliefs, but merely to say we cannot have access to or change the truth of visions seen in other’s minds. All we can do is listen, and choose where to put our own faith. In listening to her, there is much that does not resonate with me at all. And yet, on a deeper level, there is much of which she said that I think all Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, and Atheists could agree too. Namely, (1) we live in a broken world full of suffering; (2) our actions and choices impact others that we will never see; we are never an island; and (3) we can choose to live for ourselves, or we can choose to put ourselves into discomfort in order to embody compassion and generosity for strangers who it may seem have nothing in common with us (aliens, as it were).
Excitedly, the Mystic offered to draw a tarot card for each of us. I shrugged, and said if she’d like, but I wouldn’t draw it myself. The Model was more intrigued. The Aristocrat had no interest. The Mystic disappeared to fetch her cards from the car. Once she was gone I turned to other girls to see what their reaction was. The Model volunteered, “I believe about 50% of what she says.” (Which 50% I wondered.) The Aristocrat, looking a mixture of amused and concerned, “I just met her once before this trip!” Then a moment later, “I’m more of a have your feet firmly on the ground kind of girl.”
After she pulled the cards the girls were eager to get going again. We agreed that we’d explore more together. And being that there is no cellular service along the Big Sur Coast at all, I didn’t bother to get any of their numbers before we left the restaurant. Instead, we planned to meet further down the road at a specific park. But we left the parking lot at different times, and when we got to the agreed upon park it turned out to be closed. So, we lost each other. Finding them again would be like grasping at fog.
~~~
As I drove alone to Monterey that night I realized I may never see my birth or faraway alien worlds, but even with my two feet firmly on the earth, Big Sur had given me my own mystical experience — utterly unexpected, absurd, and fleeting... Another reminder that the deepest, most surprising truths often emerge when I give up my need for knowing, and instead sit non-judgmentally with strangers, especially those that seem most otherworldly. And I thought, not for the first time on this trip, life is so much bigger, stranger, connected, and beautiful than I ever realized before.
