putting the j in jjosh

(not my photo)

Six years ago I was in Puerto Rico at a meditation retreat. It was 10 days, no talking, and we ate very little, mainly fruit in the evenings. After it was over, I had a couple of days before my plane back to DC, so some of the locals suggested I go to the island of Vieques which was nearby. It was a fantastic and surreal experience. I wasn’t used to the sound of voices, or thinking, or doing things. I was still meditating every day, and trying to eat the same.

I took the ferry over there and it was full of people going for the weekend — loud families and kids, beach balls, towels, little portable radios. I went to a recommended hotel (balcony overlooking the ocean) and ate at a recommended "fonda", sort of like a working-class diner. I went in there and they looked at me like who the hell are you?! But I was all meditated out and it didn’t phase me.

In the meditation, towards the end, they have you do this thing where you really focus on every bite of food you take, focus on chewing it, and swallowing it. It’s really weird, try it. Hard to do for any length of time. I was doing this in the fonda and it was kind of blowing my mind. I had been told to rent a 4×4 and go to Green Beach. "It’s out of the way, but amazing," a friend told me at the retreat. So I did. It was a bit of a trek to get the beach, but once there, I was all alone on this amazing beach, surrounded by mangroves (maybe, something with crazy roots anyway). I went swimming and the sun beat down and it was amazing.

There were these birds that would go way up into the air and then dive down, spiralling into the water for fish. A local guy told me that this eventually led to the birds going blind, because they kept their eyes open while they dived. I saw another strange bird, kind of like a big gull, up on a little sand hill on the beach, and some strange childish mania gripped me. I started chasing the bird.

The bird was squawking like crazy, yelling at me, and running down the beach. It wouldn’t fly away. I was kind of intoxicated by the scene, the adventure, my mind-state, and kept chasing, like it was a pigeon and I was 5. It kept yelling, and running. I was laughing like crazy, jumping and waving my arms. The bird went bezerk. And then I saw that there was a nest there, that I had been chasing this bird from its nest, there were eggs in it, and the bird had been trying to protect its eggs. When I realized what had happened, I stopped in my tracks. I felt profoundly guilty, epic amounts of guilt, truckloads of guilt. I couldn’t believe what I had been doing. Why was I doing it? What in the world was going on?

The guilt passed, I calmed down, and left the bird alone. I went back to swim in the warm, crystal clear water.

Post Script: something compels me to let you all know that the bird went back to its nest and as I swam around, watching it from afar, everything seemed to be fine.