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

Morro Bay at Sunset

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THE SHORE

Words and Music by Jim Robbins

Twenty years since I last saw
the cliffs and the skeletal tree stump
where I had sat in the dusk,
the shore deserted.

A pelican glides above the waves,
tilts a little and plunges.
I don't remember pelicans offshore
twenty years ago.

Only the one
who had left me behind,
the shore timeless,
life irrelevant.

My daughter piles pincers and husks
before me twenty years later in that place
so unaltered that memory
and place match unexpectedly.

Some part of me seems untouched,
yet I could have sworn the years
had altered me beyond
recognition to myself.

In another twenty years,
others will leave me,
the waves growing violet
once again.

A pelican will glide
above the waves, tilting
a little and plunging,
my soul timeless like the shore,

the waves growing violet
once again, my soul timeless
like the shore, like the shore,
like the shore....

THE SHORE

     My friend once claimed that many have come before us who have cleared paths through the unknown. She was not talking about pioneers of the Western migration in the United States, however. She was instead referring to light-workers who have struggled through dense and sometimes extremely dark spiritual energy to make it easier for others to make their way.

     My friend is herself a courageous light-worker. Because of her I am now aware that people can send positive spiritual energy to each other—from a distance. I discovered this after a powerful Reiki session during which she removed troublesome negative energy from my aura. She then filled me with such positive energy that I could not help but believe that she was the kindest, most loving person that I have ever met. When I shared my amazement, she claimed that she is merely an imperfect vessel who channels a powerful type of energy that “knows where to go” in our energy field to heal whatever is harming us. She had, in other words, made herself a “hollow bone” to channel divine chi into my aura.

     The next day, when I was alone, I unexpectedly felt the same powerful healing energy flowing into me. I later asked her if she had somehow sent the energy to me from a distance, and she reluctantly admitted that she had. On the spiritual level, distance doesn’t matter, she claimed. We are all part of one universal energy field; within that field of consciousness there is really no distance between us. She also informed me that I would soon meet other people with amazing spiritual abilities.

     I have since met other people who send positive energy from a distance to me and others, and I have had the honor and good fortune to work with a few of them. Without even communicating in any way with one another on the physical plane, we have synced up spiritually to send positive energy to each other at the same time of day. We are empaths, so we intensely feel both positive and negative energy from other people. We each have a different spiritual modality and reside in different parts of town, but in our spiritual practices we each experience similar positive effects. I have also discovered that we even intuitively know when our subtle energetic support is no longer needed.

    Each of us, like the magi, can follow the star to the manger, where we find the powerful energies of healing and harmonizing love. It takes hard work and a lot of practice. Nevertheless, we can purify and establish harmony even in the face of daunting obstacles. 

     I saw a bumper sticker once that states, “Worship the Creator, not the creation.” I could not disagree more. The Creator is the Creation. All energy is holy. We can each connect with the Source through love for people, flowers, birds, animals, trees, divine spiritual beings, great art and literature and music. And we can connect with the Source by following our bliss—by exploring what we love. As a male in this society, I was conditioned to ignore feelings and display toughness, but I overcame that conditioning when I fell in love with people and nature and the arts. Toughness, I figured out, is great if you really want to be a sociopathic CEO or enjoy getting into stupid fights or are too afraid to reveal your feelings.

   Many people have experienced what a rock group once called “radar love,” a telepathic communication sent from a distance that stirs the heart or groin. The energy sent to me by my friends, however, is at an extremely high frequency, which is similar to the energy I feel when I connect with the Source and experience divinity through love for flowers and birds and trees and animals and people and spiritual beings. One of the most memorable experiences I have ever had is hiking through an area of great natural splendor and suddenly feeling a connection with the Source—and also suddenly feeling divine energy sent to me from a distance by a human being. Perhaps even a fraction of this profound sense of connection, experienced repeatedly by a core group of people, would be enough to transform the collective consciousness of humanity.

     I believe that the upheaval we are experiencing now is occurring mainly because old systems that lead to alienation and misery and the exploitation and destruction of individuals and groups and vast ecosystems are unsustainable and are beginning to collapse. We are now facing an opportunity to enter a new stage of evolution in which we become aware of the divinity of all life and can heal and cleanse and harmonize one another with divine energy, no matter where we are in relation to each other. In other words, we can experience "otherness" at a much higher level. At some point, hopefully sooner rather than later, we will collectively understand that we are connected more by consciousness than by the space that we occupy. We will develop reverence for the planet and for each other. But at this point spiritual pioneers must continue to clear away dense and harmful and limiting forms of consciousness so that others can find their way.

   “The Shore” describes a beach at Patrick’s Point, which is several miles north of Eureka, CA. When I was a kid, my family spent a week there in a tent trailer. My brother and I explored all the paths in the area even though it was pouring rain most of the time. One day, after hours of dashing along the trails, my brother and I around sunset found a path down to the beach. Suddenly he was gone. He had already ditched me several times that week, but this time his motivation seemed a little sinister since our campsite was far away and it was already getting dark.
   My family traveled all over California when I was growing up, and I never really paid much attention to where we landed or how we got there. When twenty years later I found myself on the beach at Patrick’s Point with my wife and daughter, I was thrown back in time. I had had no idea that we were heading back to the same beach where my brother had ditched me years before. Oddly, the beach seemed exactly the same, and I felt like I was simultaneously experiencing two different moments in time—in a timeless place.
   In the song, I wanted to focus on how over the decades the natural world can stay pretty much the same while a person in the same time period can be battered or broken by experience. All the while a sense of timelessness exists in the natural world that the soul can experience. It’s more than just a sense of timelessness, really: It’s a connection with what the ancients called the anima mundi, the “world soul,” within which everything is connected. Relationships change, horrible events disrupt lives, the physical body breaks down, but sometimes the human sense of time disappears and the soul feels connected to the subtle spirit of the earth and the cosmos and knows the underlying unity of all consciousness—which can bring peace beyond understanding to those who are suffering.