ANDY SAYS… ~ Dot Dot Dot

While on Aruba, I’ve made a habit of waking, lying in place for a few minutes on the beach, journaling my dreams and day’s plan, strolling naked, stretching, being still, gazing at the always impressive appearance of the Sun, taking a whore’s bath at the water’s edge, dressing and being on my way.  That is the prelude to my usual one-and-a-half kilometers walk past the grazing goats, over the dried coral reef, between the cacti, rattlesnakes and turquoise lizards and below the Finches and Mourning Doves, into town.  The sea at my back waves te aworo (“so long”) and the cliffs and hills bid me bon dia (“good morning”) and safe passage.  It is a wonderfully picturesque sequence of events.  I look forward to it each night.

This morning, however, the clouds above me have succumbed to pressure between the evaporation of moisture from the ground and sea and condensation pulled by gravity from the sky back to the ground and sea.  Consequently, dots called rain come lightly showering the beach, rock formations, goats, stray cats and dogs here on Berry Strip at the south end of Aruba.  Trillions of those dots cascade downward and bounce upward as far and wide as my blurring naked eyes can see.   For a moment, I allow the dots to perturb my mood.  Mainly because, my first concern, the notebook in which I place dots called words might soak and cause the ink to spread and dilute the meaning I have carefully laid to these pages.  The dots in my notebook, like the dot in my head, carry my inner-most thoughts and Truths.  I do my best to protect them.

My mood changes as I begin to laugh at the fact, I, for a moment, allowed anger to distract me from the beautiful reality of the paradise I currently inhabit in the Tropic of Cancer.  Returning, sea-bound, to my makeshift abode less than ten meters from the water’s edge I notice the dots I made on the way to town.  While re-tracing my dots, I wonder how many dots’ moods I, like the rain, have off-set while carelessly walking over or trampling homes, squashing lives, ruining notebooks.  It has occurred to me many times how I am a mere dot on the surface of a dot called Earth, within a solar system of dots, among an innumerable number of dots within one dot called the Universe.

Befuddled, slightly bewildered at the immensity and complexity of this day’s lesson; I  contemplate, sit back, try to relax and listen for an explanation in the sounds of the wind carrying the dots that patter on the roof of the dot I’m calling home.  Are there words or enough imagination to comprehend what took these dots thirty to forty seconds to say to me?

The only answer that’s come to me is, “…”