All Text, Music, and Illustrations, including Paintings, Photographs, and 3D models, Copyright © 2022 by Jim Robbins.  

Holes

 

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HOLES

Words and Music by Jim Robbins

Near a series of smooth holes
in the rock, we sat quietly
for hours, not catching
anything. In one hole, a butterfly edged

on the slick surface toward stagnant water.
In another, two butterflies hung frozen,
wings open, the web
barely visible against gray stone.

You died a week later. Twenty years,
and the butterflies are here again.
The stone is cool and smooth,
almost comfortable enough

to sleep on. In another twenty years
I will wake, the same
age as you,
the water still flowing

into the deep pool as we gaze
at the buckeyes, the butterflies
rising and falling, our bodies
still shadows in the flowing water.

HOLES

     When I was eleven, my father heard a rumor that the North Fork of the Kings River was teeming with trout, so the next Saturday my family ended up scrambling down a steep slope to grasp fishing poles all afternoon. I wasn’t catching anything, and eventually a huge rock on the other side of the river caught my attention. I suddenly felt inexplicably certain that I would find something valuable on that rock, so I risked my life leaping from stone to stone across the rushing water as my parents yelled at me to come back.

     When I finally reached the huge rock on the other side, I searched every inch of it. After awhile, I started digging the humus and dirt out of the cracks, believing that I might find a knife or something like it. At that point in my life, I had no idea that people had flourished by the rivers and streams of the Sierra Nevada Mountains for thousands of years.

     More and more frustrated as I searched the nooks and crannies, I finally stood up and grunted under my breath, “What the hell am I looking for?”

     I then clearly heard a disembodied male voice near me, “Native Americans.”

     I turned around completely without seeing anyone. “What do you mean, Native Americans?” I implored.

     After what seemed like a long pause, the voice replied, “You will find out.”

     My mother, perhaps noticing my consternation, found her way to the other side of the river directly across from me. She yelled over the roaring water, “What are you doing over there?”

     “Searching for something,” I replied.

     “Like what?” she asked.

     “Something Native American.”

     She gave me a puzzled look. “You mean Indian?” she shouted. At that time in the United States, “Native American” was not a commonly used term.

     I stared back at her for several seconds and nodded my head.

     “Be careful!”

     Several times, I have heard a calm, male voice predicting the future, and each time the prediction has come true, almost as if some kind of hole can form in the space time continuum that reveals the future.

Native American Pounding Stone with Pestles in the Mortars

     The disembodied voice hinted at the adventure that I would experience decades in the future. About twenty years after I heard the voice, as I was hiking on a distinct path through a woodland forest, I unexpectedly came upon a Native American pounding stone. I kept following the same path and discovered more pounding stones in the area. Over the years, I have found numerous Native American village sites in the foothills, many of them with house pits and with pestles still in the mortars of the pounding stones. 

     Forty-five years after I heard that clear, disembodied voice, I found two Native American pounding stones on the North Fork of the Kings River about a quarter of a mile north of the fishing hole. The large stone that I searched so carefully when I was eleven, by the way, resembles a large pounding stone.

     Just after my seventeenth birthday, my father and I returned to fish together at the same hole a week before he died of a heart attack. He was fifty-five years old. I remembered sitting quietly that day near one of the smooth holes made over the eons by rushing waters; in the hole two monarch butterflies hung with their wings open in a barely visible web.

     After I turned fifty-five, twenty years after I wrote the song, I began experiencing Atrial Fibrillation (A fib), a form of heart disease, and I decided to return to the hole, one last time, I thought. 

     I vowed to do everything in my power to avoid the ominous prediction in the song. After I did much physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual work on my own, spiritual healers finally cleared me of dark energy, and my heart disease disappeared.

     Since disembodied voices have accurately predicted my future on more than one occasion, I now believe that we live in a hologram that contains all of time at once, which might lead one to the conclusion that all experience in our dimension is predetermined. Due to my own spiritual work and the aid of spiritual healers, I have experienced a deep healing that has resulted in optimal health on all levels--physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual. So I now also believe that effective spiritual work can create a profoundly harmonious change that "reprograms" the cosmic plan. In the linear time of our dimension, a negative pattern that can affect an individual, a family, a community, or even a society can be altered on the spiritual level to create greater balance within the "divine programming." 

   If you are following my logic, you might claim that the spiritual healing I experienced was also programmed in the divine plan, but my intuition tells me that dedicated human beings using free will can co-create with the Source and reprogram the plan to create greater harmony in our dimension even on a large scale....