The Simpatico Series Box Set (3 books in 1)

by Dermot Davis

  Even in the jet black darkness of the night, sleep did not come easily for Fiona, however. Soon realizing that she might have misunderstood the nature of her environment, she appreciated that she was now receiving an education. Unlike humans, the desert doesn’t actually awaken during the day and fall asleep at night. In fact, judging by the shuffling noises she was hearing both near and far, it would appear to be the other way around. It’s at night that the desert wakes up. It’s at night when the animals appear to hunt and mate with each other and maybe fight anything that threatens to attack their territory.

  It wasn’t just the noises around her that helped prove her new theory: she could sense movement around her. As if she was now tuned in to this new wondrous ecosystem, she could tell that the activity level of the desert network had shifted. In her over-active mind’s eye, she could imagine that all kinds of little critters were scurrying about, running for their lives while larger, scarier monsters were chasing them with open mouths and claws.

  Supposedly, few creatures in the desert wilds would actually harm a person, if the person would just stay out of their way. The thought did not make Fiona feel any better, however. She found that she felt less terrified of the larger, more dangerous animals like coyotes and Bobcats than she did the smaller reptiles like snakes, not to mention scorpions and tarantulas.

  As if a racket was going on outside her flimsy dwelling--or, in human terms, as if there was a block party in full swing--the noise meant that Fiona lay awake for hours and hours and didn’t get a wink of the deep recuperative sleep that she so badly desired. She considered how she had approached this ceremony and powerful experience like so many others in her life, without preparation.

  She hadn’t waited to prepare her body, to get in shape and build her strength, or anything else. Just thinking about how impulsive and silly she could act sometimes made her feel like crying. The more she thought about it, the more she realized that she had approached this vision quest thing in the same way that she had approached joining her soul and soul path with Andrew’s: like she had blindly jumped off a cliff.

  In a state of semi-consciousness, images and thoughts of her beloved, their candlelit soul ceremony on top of the cliffs of the Pacific Palisades, so long ago, flitted through her mind. Eventually, she watched the sun come up through the see-through mesh at the opening of the tent. She seriously considered that, like her nocturnal neighbors, for the remainder of her time there, she too might sleep during the days and awaken with each night. Her mouth dry with thirst and her belly aching for food, all she truly wanted to do right then was sleep.

  Eating some trail mix and drinking some water helped but the sudden need to empty her bladder caused her much more distress than she considered that it truly warranted. It should seem like an easy task to move her body from the tent to an appropriate spot in the wilds to perform her bodily function, however, the thoughts of moving seemed like an immense obstacle to overcome.

  Her body felt as if it weighed a ton and her head alone felt like it weighed twice that amount. In fact, with her head and body pressed firmly to the earth, it felt like she was a part of the land. Separating from mother earth did not seem like it was a current option. It was curious, the earth, the land, the actual ground, had all by itself taken on a feminine and nurturing quality and Fiona found that she didn’t wish to leave it. She felt both heavy and beautifully and lovingly held by the earth.

  When she did finally summon the will to move--and thus attempt to avoid the unpleasant consequences she would suffer should she remain in place and fail to urinate outside--she had a hard time standing up. Bent over, her muscles sore from the all-night contact with the hard ground, she managed with difficulty to unzip the flap that would release her from the tent. Once outside, and still in a bent-over position, her body swayed uncertainly. The harsh light from the sun blinded her and the heat and sunlight sent a pain through her head that felt excruciating.

  As she winced with the sharpness of the pain in her head, she realized that the pain had been there all along, she just hadn’t realized it until she actually moved. Feeling like she was about to lose consciousness, she reached out to hold onto something, anything that she hoped would steady her. Grabbing hold of the top of the tent which had no chance of supporting her weight, she collapsed. The failing tent, the collapsing poles and waterproof fabric, brought her safely to the ground, where she lay, unconscious and unmoving.

  When she awoke, it was morning still or again. She wasn’t certain which. As she opened her eyes in bafflement, she had no idea of the length of time that she had been sleeping. Without a watch, or a phone or a laptop or a tablet, she had no clue what time it might be, nor what day of the week it might be or maybe even what month of the year it was. All she did know was what was before her: a collapsed tent, an umbrella that she had never unfurled and lots of tubes of sunscreen, which she had yet to use.

  As she looked around at the now familiar view of her desert, it looked different than before. She didn’t know exactly why or if it actually looked visually different, it just felt different for some reason. The desert didn’t seem like it was out there, the desert felt like it was part of her; or rather, she felt like she was part of it; like there was no separation between out there and in here, her own mind. Was it all in her head? Was there no out there, out there?

  Feeling woozy from lack of real food, dizzy, weak, and as if she were experiencing vertigo, she knew that she was not thinking straight. As if her brain was split, her mind felt generally distorted. Then again, how did she know that her mind was distorted? There had to be an alert part of her mind that knew that the rest of her mind was feeling generally distorted. She knew that whatever she was thinking, whatever thoughts that she may be having in such a state were uncertain and not to be trusted. Maybe her normal reality, the feeling of being separate from the mother earth, was the distortion.

  She felt like a part of her was watching herself watch herself; like she was looking in a mirror at a mirror reflection of herself that infinitely reflected images of herself all the way to… infinity. In short, she felt darn near crazy but it was a rather awe-inspiring wild perception of reality that was pleasant in a disturbing kind of way.

  She didn’t think about sitting down until she sat down and when she did sit down she was sitting on a boulder which overlooked everything. She didn’t know how she got there because she couldn’t remember deciding to get there and she didn’t even ask herself how she got there: she was just there.

  The desert became a blur before her, or rather, it was if the shapes of everything couldn’t hold their shape, and, as a result, everything kept dancing into everything else. The shapes of the rocks were bleeding into the shapes of the shrubs and the sand and the Joshua trees. Everything looked like molecules of matter rippling and moving. All reality looked like it was dancing. The sun was going down in the sky as if it was too heavy to stay afloat for too long and the molecules of reality soon joined in the dance and moved in and out of what became multiple realities, right before her unsteady eyes.

  Something blew past her, on the ground in the wind, and, even though she knew that there was no wind, the object didn’t look out of place. But it was out of place because she recognized the object as Andrew’s baseball cap; the one with the A for Angels logo on the front. She even knew what it was doing there. As she watched it being blown past her in the desert, the smart boulder that sat across from her was telling her everything through the mirror of nature. “You know what this baseball cap is doing in your vision, don’t you?” it asked non-judgmentally.

  “Yes, I do,” Fiona answered, suddenly feeling an avalanche of regret and remorse that threatened her very existence. “That’s the cap that I found in my father’s ritual room and I didn’t do or say a thing about it. I pretended that I didn’t see it because it was too painful for me to see it and I regret that now.”

  “What do you regret?” the smart stone asked.

  “I regret not saying
something to my father, that I realized that he’d used the hat in some dark ritual, or not telling Andrew that my father was responsible for all his trouble with the accident and the law and being in jail and everything,” she said as her heart open and wailed with the agony of regret and her body shook as she sobbed. “I took no responsibility and hoped that, staying silent, everything would work out okay.”

  “And how did staying silent work out for you?” the boulder asked, without attitude.

  “It turned out horribly,” Fiona said as she wept. “It turned out badly for Andrew and I made matters worse when I sided with my father and not with Andrew,” she said as her body shook with ongoing intense sobbing.

  “You remained silent.”

  “Yes. I remained silent.”

  “You remained silent,” the boulder repeated.

  “Yes, I remained silent!” Fiona shouted so loud that she woke herself up.

  Fiona didn’t actually know if she had woken up or if she had actually sat on a boulder and had a conversation with another boulder; she knew that her mind could not be trusted. She felt deeply connected with the beauty of life and somehow, without consciously attempting to reach any goal, the ceremony of the vision quest had revealed to her a great personal weakness. Lying face down and sprawled out over her tent, she raised her head and saw that it was morning. Looking up at the boulder, that she could have sworn she was just sitting upon, while communicating with an adjacent boulder, she lifted herself up to a standing position.

  Fiona left her makeshift camp and climbed slowly and gently, preparing herself mentally as if meeting a close friend, up to the friendly, sitting boulder. When she got there and looked around, the view looked oddly familiar. She looked across at the opposite boulder, the large rock that she was drawn to, and smiled. Even though the smart boulder looked like it was possibly denying everything that had just happened, she could totally believe that the boulder spoke to her and not just that, had meant every word.

  “You can play dumb but I know that you know,” she said to the smart boulder. “And I’m not blaming you at all; I’m not angry, honest. You did me a big favor and it should be me that’s thanking you. So, thank you,” she said sincerely, and her heart filled with gratitude for the rock, the land, and all reality, for its teaching and safe-keeping. She could tell that the boulder blushed with embarrassment, just a little.

  Fiona sat on the larger boulder for a long time more. She didn’t know that she had been sitting in the same spot for a long time because in her state of mind, she had no conception of time. In fact, truth be told, she didn’t know where she was, either, not really. She could see the scene before her but she would not have considered that she was separate from anything that was before her: in her mind, there was no separation between who she was and where she was; she just was, she existed. She was part of, one with, the consciousness that was all around her.

  Paradoxically, the more that she lost herself to the impersonal nature of her surroundings, the more that she reclaimed a greater sense of who she truly was. She could even tell that the person that she truly was, the truth that was her real identity, was different than the person that she thought herself to be; the person that the world knew as Fiona. The Fiona person was much more uncertain than her true nature, the real self that was now looking through her eyes and that she was now getting to know. No wonder she was confused some of the time. She often shifted, sometimes quite rapidly, between her true nature and her personality.

  Unlike the Fiona personality, her true self was fearless. As she sat upon the desert rock in the center of her world and existence, the Fiona personality wept. Having now met her true self, Fiona could see how fearful that she was, normally, in comparison. She could now see quite clearly, for the very first time in her existence, how truly fearful she had almost always been. She could see how her fears had affected her decisions; how her fears had kept her from speaking her truth, how her fears had imprisoned her, as surely as any physical cell with iron bars would have done so.

  She could see how her fear had affected others in her life. She saw images of her father and how he had been impacted by her fearfulness. As if she was being shown a do-over of the past, she could see how he would have behaved differently had she been less fearful and lived her life more truthfully. Had she stood up in her truthfulness, he would have been forced to stand up in his own. He wouldn’t have liked it but it would have changed him. By standing up in her own strength, she could have impressed and inspired him for the better. When she succumbed to fear, her father’s furtive shadow nature was empowered.

  “Not pretty, is it?” the smart boulder asked as if it too could see what she was seeing.

  “No,” Fiona said, feeling overwhelmed by her new realizations. “It’s not pretty.”

  “Don’t feel bad,” the rock said, feeling her pain. “It’s not just you. It’s all humans. You shouldn’t feel bad about it.”

  “It’s hard not to feel bad about it,” Fiona said as an emotional numbness began to take hold of her nervous system. “I’ve been weak,” she said, steadying her body so as not to fall off the large rock. “When I should have been strong, I’ve taken the easy way out.”

  “That’s just how it is for humans,” the smart boulder said. “All humans, everywhere, throughout time. You see it now. That’s all you need to do. Just see it. That’s all.”

  “Okay,” Fiona said wearily. “I guess.”

  “You’re lucky,” the boulder then said, as if trying a new approach. “You got to see it in yourself. You know how many humans live out their lives and they never got to see that in themselves? Almost one hundred percent. That’s right. Close to one hundred percent of humans never get to see what you just witnessed in yourself. And you’re just a kid.”

  “I’m not a kid,” Fiona responded in a surly manner.

  “You got the rest of your life to live it any way you choose. You should feel blessed.”

  “I do feel blessed,” Fiona said, her heart begging to expand, and she smiled.

  “That’s the spirit.”

  “I do feel blessed,” she said again, a thankful smile breaking out upon her face. Gratitude filled her being and she became radiant with the energy of the emotion. “Thank you, smart boulder. For everything.”

  “You’re very welcome.”

  “I need to leave now,” she then said, knowing that it was time. “See you again, sometime.” The molecules of the desert rippled and wavered before her. It was stunningly beautiful and Fiona quietly wept with gratitude at the majesty of landscape.

  “Visit whenever you can,” the boulder said amicably. “I’m not going anywhere anytime soon.”

  “Later,” she said with a smile as she removed her body from the large rock that she had been sitting upon.

  Knowing with certainty that she was done with her visit to the desert, Fiona looked all around her one last time. Breathing in its freshness and beauty, her head rolled back, she extended her arms wide to her sides and twirled in a circle. She felt all creation, the world of spirit, expand to meet her, to help strengthen the circle of her soul purpose.

  When she returned to the tent, what had been her place of power during her vision quest, the first thing that she felt compelled to do was to search her pockets. She found her keys, and, hanging from her keychain, a small rose quartz. She took the rose quartz stone from the keychain and left it as an appropriate offering for the earth. After a prayer of gratitude, she set about erasing all signs of her stay in that place.

  Repacking the tent as best she could, she grabbed all her stuff, leaving nothing human to pollute and contaminate the precious earth mother. She walked back out the way she had come, due west. Walking for longer than she had expected, she wondered if perhaps she had misjudged her direction and was now lost. Recognizable landmarks were rare, so looking for familiar sights or markers seemed futile. “Fiona!” she heard a voice call out. Apart from a hawk gliding high in the sky, she saw no sign of human life. Di
d the hawk call her name? Impossible. Wasn’t it?

  The voice must be Arjuna calling, she determined. Turning to walk in the direction that the voice had come from, she smiled with the thought that she sensed that he had been watching her all along, most probably from day one. He wasn’t the rapscallion that he pretended to be, she thought fondly to herself. Sure enough, in the new path that she had chosen, beneath the hawk in the sky, she could now see the evidence of humanity encroaching upon the pristine land in front of her: in the distance, an RV trailer and a couple of automobiles sat baking in the heat of the desert sun.

  Toothpick hanging from the side of his mouth, his cowboy boots showing evidence of fresh dirt, Arjuna stood casually in the open door of his trailer. “You need help there, girlie?” he asked with a grin that failed to hide his pleasure at seeing her return.

  “Good to see you, too,” Fiona said with a smile. “Man, it’s so good to be back,” she then said, surprising herself at how good it felt to have returned from her ordeal and be still in one piece. “I know it wasn’t all that long but it feels so good to be back.”

  “How long you think you’ve been out there?” he asked as she arrived at the trailer.

  “Two days?” she asked, unable to remember or compute the passage of time.

  “That’s what I thought,” Arjuna said, helping her offload her stuff. “You’ve been gone four days.”

  “I have?” Fiona said, clearly surprised. “Four days?”

  “You look pretty good, considering,” he said, looking her over for any obvious bodily injury. “Apart from a bit of sunburn here and there, maybe the loss of a pound or two, you’re in good shape.”

  Once inside the trailer, Fiona made a bee line for the first thing that she could sit upon. She settled for the seat of the lower bunk.