Dive Into Your Imagination

I had been on the road for nearly two years when I first set foot in Indonesia. I bought a ticket to Australia, learned to scuba dive and sail and then spent the next two years working and living in Australia and New Zealand. I had looked at a girl’s pictures of Indonesia on a bus ride going to Cape Tribulation and knew I had to visit the country. Nowhere in my life do I remember ever seeing such beauty. A moment captured in my mind. And immediately after completing my dive instructor’s course in Auckland, New Zealand I went to the travel agent and turned in my ticket to America for a one way ticket to Bali, Indonesia.

I was going to go and either travel for two months the $1,000 in my wallet (all the money I had in the world) or I was going to find a job as a dive instructor.

Life was just that easy. “Do it while you are young kid, when you get to be my age you can’t climb the mountains you want to climb. You can only look at them in photos.” My Grandmother said. Travel brings freedom, if you are open to the road that unfolds as you go. If I would have left home to travel with the intention of going somewhere, experiencing something and returning, I would have missed glorious years of my life.

There were pros and cons to this stage of life though. The left side of my brain kept saying, you are wasting your life. And the right side of my brain said, “Oh my gosh…look at the world, it is GLORIOUS, full of experiences for the taking.” And it was just me, a girl, born and raised in Chicago living around the world a hostess and deckhand in the Whit Sunday Islands of Australia, a traveler with the New Zealand Rodeo, and now a scuba diving instructor on her way to live in Indonesia…

Who would have thought? And that is exactly what I did not…think. If we think too much about our decisions, then we go nowhere. We get caught up in a planned life. Now I am not saying, do not plan because somehow I was part of life’s plan. “LISTEN TO YOUR GUT. Your gut never lies to you. Our heads often get in the way of what we want to do, what we think we should do…but in the end…listen to your gut.” Jed Hammer a business man and diver I met in Belize years later gave me these words of advice nearly ten years after I had been listening to my gut. But it is like that in life…in our youth we act on impulse and intuition and life beats us down and our thoughts get in the way.

Do you listen to your gut? Your intuition? The inner sense and feeling that you know is right or wrong? Its funny, if you observe a child, they are probably the best at listening to their guts but it is the adults in their lives that take this away. Children know what is right and wrong, it is almost as if it is a born instinct. Yet this changes because we have to listen to our parents and other adults that tell us, “You CAN’T do that. No, you should not feel that way.” And in some cases, they are right and looking out for our protection. And in other’s they are programming us to be just like they are. Instilling their fears within their children. FEAR=False Evidence Appearing Real. I don’t know when I heard that acronym for the first time, yet that became my mantra for a long time. Whenever I am afraid, anxious, upset it boils down to some type of fear. Fear of failure, fear that I am not good enough, fear of judgment…and fear is a debilitating emotion. Fear stops us like a deer in headlights. By educating ourselves we can face our fear with knowledge and come to understand how this can be a useful tool.

There are only two emotions in life and all others stem from these: Love and Fear. I am forever the teacher and forever the student in life. If I can hold a dialogue with myself when I become emotional, I can usually work my way through anything just using love and fear as the tools and breaking down my emotion.

And at 25 that is exactly what I did. My mother thought I would go to Australia and be home two weeks later. She really did not think that I had it in my soul to be away from friends or family for an extended length of time. From the very beginning, I did not know the road I would travel. From contacts I had five people I could contact in Australia once I landed…again, this was the days before the internet and cell phones. I names and addresses in my phone book and had decided that whoever could come and pick me up when I arrived in Melbourne, Australia was where I would start my journey. Even way back then it was all about the game of life. I would make up these little games to humor myself.

From the beginning, I had a camera and a journal. In college I had stopped writing because one of my professors had given me a C and told me I did not know how to write. It was the first C of my life and I took that to heart. I laugh about this now because I think I was 20 years old and I let a C ruin my life for years! Nearly a decade later in a classroom in California I took a class with the late Bayard Stockton and he asked our class, “How many of you stopped writing because someone gave you a bad grade?” All of us looked sheepishly around the room as every single hand raised into the silence.

In my third decade of life I started writing again and never stopped. But at the time I started my travels, I allowed myself to write poetry and to journal only for myself, never sharing it with anyone. Because I did this, I have moments frozen in time from the early years on the road. And when I look back at my writing and life, I laugh because you can take the girl out of the city, yet you can’t take the city out of the girl. We are who we are, as long as we allow ourselves to be who we are. That might sound funny, yet it is absolutely the truth. Most of us stop ourselves from our true potentials. We set goals that are too low for ourselves. We believe we either have to follow in our parents’ footsteps or go on to “DO” better than they did. The “doing” better is usually monetary because our society forces the masses to judge ourselves around the amount of money we make, not the person that we have become. We lose the way of intuition and stop being who we are. Who are you? Can you answer that? What makes you come alive? What our world needs is not people who are out there doing, but being the people they were born to be. We know who we are, yet it is just usually covered up with a large pile of manure that includes our past and who we think we were yesterday and who we think we need to become tomorrow. Who are you? Who am I?

PLAY PLAY Life is a game everyday! Sea lions, Channel Islands, California

Who Lives in the Sea? The Award Winning “Who Lives In the Sea?” teaches children and their parents about animals living in the ocean. Why do dolphins move so fast? What kind of noise does a sea lion make? Did you know turtles walked with the dinosaurs? Meet whale sharks, o

DIYI COLLECTION dive into you imagination with these cards!!