The Longtailed One: "Run Toward That Which Scares You" Part Five
SUMMARY:
This is video number five of my video series, "Run Towards That Which Scares You." I'm taking a bit of a different track in this video and the ones going forward.
Let me ask you a question. Have you ever been visited by an animal or a bird and you kind of felt like they were trying to tell you something? Okay, yeah, I'm getting ready to dip into the woo-woo...just bear with me.
There was a bird that came to see me while I was at sea.
Beginning on day two of my sail, my attempted sail across the Atlantic Ocean, I was a little more than a hundred miles off the coast of North Carolina. It was morning and the sun was barely up. A bird comes out of nowhere, flying towards the mast. No big deal, right? It's a seabird with a long tail, which actually turned out to be two tail feathers.
He does this for like ten or fifteen minutes. Then he flies down to within maybe ten feet of my head, hovering and staring at me. I'm thinking, "This guy wants some food."
I break out a loaf of bread, break off a couple of pieces, toss it to the bird and it just goes right past him and lands in the water. He [or she] just hovers and stares at me. The bread lands in the water. A different bird lands, grabs the piece of bread and takes off. By the way, every other bird that I saw out there, all the way to Bermuda, would just fly by the boat not paying attention to me at all.
The long-tailed bird hovers and stares at me, for like fifteen minutes. Then he flies around the boat a couple of times, comes back to that same spot, and again, stares at me. He flies around the boat once more and takes off to the horizon. I thought, "Okay."
In the same direction the bird is flying to the horizon, I see a ship. I realize now I am, based on my calculations, on a collision course with this ship. No big deal. It's daytime, so I just turn the boat and go behind it and keep on going down my merry way. I thought it interesting within that moment, that I did not see the ship until the bird pointed it out to me. Sure, perhaps I would have seen the ship even if the bird was never there...perhaps not...none of us will ever know for sure.
The wild thing is the next morning and every single morning all the way to Bermuda, I don’t know if it was that bird, or if it wasn’t, would come visit me at the same time every single morning. It would do the same thing...come down to within ten feet of my head and stare at me.
My last full day at sea, I'm approximately seventy miles off the coast of Bermuda, three of them came to see me and they all did the same thing. They were flying in formation. They flew around the boat and then stopped, all three of them, and stared at me.
You're thinking, "So what? Some birds were checking you out, dude." Perhaps.
The first full day I was in Bermuda, I walked into a pharmacy with the intention of getting a postcard to send it to a loved one back home. She still has the postcard, by the way. There's a picture of the bird on the postcard rack. I pick it up, flip it over, and it's the Bermuda Longtail, National Bird of Bermuda. If you’ve read my book, this whole story is in "Path of Three Hundred: Volume 1."
Here's the coolest part of this story. I had to leave my boat in Bermuda for five months. I am in a cab ride on the way to the airport, and I get in the cab. All of what had gone on on the sail to Bermuda was still massively in my head. The cabbie smiles and had a very profound look on his face.
"You sail in here?"
"Well, yeah, how did you know that?"
He told me I looked a bit crusty, and I did. A long story short, he asked me to tell him a story. I told him the same story that I just told you, and he gets this smile on his face. There was a long pause...
"Is your father still alive?"
"Well, no, my father died fishing in the Atlantic Ocean in 2001."
There was a long pause again and he said, "What did your father do?"
"He was a fighter pilot in the Marine Corps."
"So do you know the meaning of the Longtail?"
"No."
"Well, some of us Bermudians believe that the Longtail carries the spirits of loved ones who have passed on in our lives. That was your father."
That moment sent a chill down my spine.
My father flew the f8 Crusader, which was his favorite jet while serving in the United states Marine corps...this image of the longtail looks very similar to the f8 crusader jet aircraft.
Here's what I've learned:
Sometimes we're given signs, and I believe the universe was giving me a sign. I believe that the universe was somehow, some way, telling me that I was going to be protected and I had an angel beside me. That’s the way I interpret it.
Yeah, I know, the old world paradigm is this:
Everything can be explained. Do a mathematical equation and you can figure shit out. Yeah, well, if you're a scientist, you know that ain't true. The old world thinking is everything can be explained, everything must be explained. I don’t want to be freaked out. If something is happening, there is an explanation for it.
To me, the new thinking is humbleness. I used to be that way. I wanted everything explained to me. Just humble thyself to the Universe (or whatever you have to call "IT"...I don't care because I firmly believe in not judging others for what they choose to believe even if do not agree with it. To me, that is also old world thinking and look at where that kind of judgmental thinking has gotten our planet). Not everything can be explained.
Think about moments in your life right now, about experiences you’ve had that you can't explain. My guess is you’ve had them, and it's okay. It's kind of cool, actually.
There's been other things. On the way back from Bermuda to North Carolina, there were some other experiences that happened, and I'm going to talk about them. I crossed through the Bermuda Triangle. I know what you're thinking, because that’s the way I used to be, "Bermuda Triangle, whatever, dude. It's blah, blah, blah." What I do know is while I was out there, stuff happened, and I'll talk about that in a different video.
What do you do when stuff like that happens and you can't explain it?
You find like-minded people just like I referred to in one of the other videos. There's stuff out there that we don’t understand. That’s a given. Try to imagine the limit of the universe and then get back to me on that one when you figure it out.
In the next video, and I appreciate you watching this, I'm going to continue this series about certain events that I couldn’t explain while at sea. This was occurring at a time in my life where I couldn’t figure out what I wanted to do next. To me, that’s when this kind of stuff begins to happen.
We have an idea of what we think we want to do, but we're not quite sure and we feel frustrated and we feel overwhelmed. We feel all of these things, and then we get a sign from something. That is exactly what happened to me, and I had to flow with those signs because of where I was. Maybe that’s part of the lesson that I needed to learn. Had I not been that far out there by myself, alone, I would have just shut down, forgetting the sign, and walked away, but I didn’t. I didn’t have a choice. I couldn’t go anywhere, but forward.
That’s what I'm hoping you're getting out of this. The next time something like that happens, think about it, talk to somebody about it. Maybe there's meaning there.
Till the next video...
Discover what your soul wants and tell your ego to take a hike, in a loving way.
Peace to you.