Intuition

Dear ones,

We send you a glorious sunrise greeting from Big Corn Island, sitting among the palms, sipping our Nica coffee and reflecting upon intuition.  The primary event that led us to this reflection occurred a couple of days ago.

The morning began as usual:  up in time to greet the sunrise dawning behind cumulus clouds to the east over the Caribbean.  We were granted various boons for our chosen earliness, including the companionship of the largest hermit crab either of us had ever seen knuckling its way in a circumnavigation around the yard within one of the more beautifully intact conch shells we have seen on the island.

We decided to take a walk starting up a hill just outside of our lodging into a different and more remote part of the island than we had explored, stopping almost immediately at the opulent resort-styled hotel just up the road from us, where we greeted by a pair of toucans in a cage, hopped upon by a capuchin monkey on a tethered leash, and visited the concrete enclosure of a small crocodile.  Sandwiched between these enclosures were an outdoor spa with booths for massage, pedicures, and facials, an infinity-view pool, a rooftop fireplace/barbecue/movie-viewing area, and 24 hour full-service, balcony perched bedrooms.  We left to go for a jungle walk up the hill.

Soon after our departure we encountered two young men, both in their teens sitting on a rock beside the jungle path. We had stoppped just before seeing them to look up into the trees after David exclaimed when I asked him what he was looking at, " I feel eyes in the trees". They asked us the time which we could only guess at, commenting that it was time for a walk and continued on our way only a short distance before stepping away from the main path to examine the ruin of a stone building  of an unknown, previous era which the jungle had begun to reclaim.  Sandy had, as I had had, an intuitive feeling, an awareness on a psychic level, that we shouldn't have gone down that path, that the two young men had a subtle malevolence in their beings.  Not overtly so.  Not strongly so, but malevolent nonetheless.  I, too, felt uneasy about leaving the main road, but I chose also not to react to that uneasiness.  Instead, we both agreed to continue down the slope away from the main, the more-traveled, the wider, the more-open path. When, after just a short while, we decided to turn back we again encountered the two men but this time there was no denying that something was definitely wrong. They were coming to seek us out, machetes in arms to rob us. David's reply to their demand to show them what was in our backpack was ,"Why?" The one boy mumbled something about his mother being sick while the other one, standing behind David, sheepishly looked like he'd rather not be involved. I followed David's question with commenting on how we didn't have anything worth stealing because we were staying just down the way and were going on a walk and hadn't brought any money. Still holding the machete  with the blade vertical approximately even with his face, he reached out with his left hand to feel the contents of the daypack that David was still wearing.  Sandy took the verbal lead again and said that we only had a water bottle in the pack, and when he queried about what else he was feeling, said that it was our room key attached to a block of wood. He demonstrated his inexperience at this newly chosen profession and lack of conviction by neither opening the backpack nor searching us, but rather stepped aside and with a slight bow waved us on our way.

Their lack of violent aggression, the apologetic bow, and their lack of reaping any spoils whatsoever, influenced our decision to continue on our late morning stroll, not without some misgivings about whether the incident was completely over, if nothing more than serving to put us on an emotional high alert until we encountered civilization. Before leaving the immediate area of the encounter, however, we paused to retrieve the Leatherman hidden within the pack, that Sandy had purposely forgotten to mention in the inventory she had given to our young thief, and grabbed a couple of stout tree branches for walking sticks.

Our choice to continue rather than turning back rewarded us with an immersion in the densest, tallest jungle forest we had experienced on the island, complete with a deliciously aromatic, lusciously sweetly-fragranced tree in full bloom as well as a sighting of the first raptor we had encountered on the island, a white-headed, gray-bodied solitary bird that is most probably a black-collared hawk.

Life is a continual teacher, a balance.  Because we live in  a stressed environment, a world in peril, an angst-ridden society, we are perhaps constantly using this heightened awareness, this state of intuitive high-alert, causing it to lose its elasticity, much like an overused muscle, so that it is not available as often, not as distinguishable from the norm, from the everyday.

When we fail to heed our intuition, the results are oftentimes instructive in a disappointing or negative way. We both wish for the time when intuition becomes is readily recognized and heeded.