Santa Barbara Mermaid

I spent three days in my wonder place...a place that opens my heart. Santa Barbara may not be where I grew up, but it is where I learned to listen to the still small voice that spoke to me. I had walked on many beaches left home for a dream at 18, and spent time walking in the mountains...I had tuned out the demands around me before I arrived at UCSB...but I had not listened. 

The voice...in fact the many voices...that had called to me through the years, whispered to me at night calling me to something higher...or perhaps deeper had been with me since I was a child. I never really knew what the voices wanted, just that I needed to answer. Only I did not know how.

But somehow living close enough to the ocean to smell the salt, seeing the waves daily, running along the sandy sheath that connected the land and the sea, I started to understand what I was being called to do. It was in Santa Barbara that I started to study Hebrew. It was there that I circled back, though not completely, to my Jewish roots and had my Bat Mitzvah. And with that the voices grew quiet...for a very long time.

Of course quiet comes with a price. The voices that haunted me were gone, but so was the tantalizing song that had lured me deeper into life. I was free from the words, but I had lost my compass. So I tried anything that seemed to have the same resonance...the same rhythm. From meditation to sweat lodges, from wiccan circles to Shamanic visioning, from chanting and drumming to running and running and running and running. But the only time I was able to feel the correct song was when I was near the sea.

So no matter where I am, I travel there to listen for that one song that echos in my heart and clears my mind of all unknown fears. I remember who I truly am and why I have always...always...loved mermiads. As Anais Nin said "I must be a mermaid. I have not fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living." To be continued.