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A sailboat
jumping over the waves
caressing the sea
~Haiku

Keeping fingers crossed isn’t enough.

Everyone faces times when the only option in the face of danger is to draw upon invisible reserves. It’s like being the captain spotting the lighthouse from the raging sea, knowing what to do, and thinking only of succeeding.

That’s not a metaphor I use lightly. When I was 20 years old, I was caught at sea (Lake Michigan that is) on an 18-foot wooden sailboat. A gale had blown up and we were suddenly tossed like a toy on waves as high as 25 feet.

I remember how with all my might I kept my center in the heart, and with it I firmly anchored my sight to the distant shore. I felt as though I were a magical creature, and the fire in my being would draw us safely in. And it did, but not without the skipper who was also made of fire, keeping command over his crew of three.

It wasn’t easy though. One of the crew panicked and started doing her own thing with the mainstay, which is the big rope that secures a ship’s mainmast. That’s when things began to get scary, yet something moved me like lightning. I took the rope from her hands and tied it back on as the skipper commanded.

Many who know me might say I am a strong willed person and they would expect that of me. But not so then; I was shy and retiring. Granted, I had learned to pilot my father’s motor boat from an early age, but this was my first experience out on a sail boat. And never before was I in such a storm on any size craft.

To this day I don’t know how, at 5’2″ and 105 lbs, I even had the human energy or spunk to take over. But not to do so was unthinkable. We rode that wave to shore, and into a long channel. The weather on the outside of that channel was threatening, but once we got inside people were calmly enjoying their picnics on the grassy banks. There never was anything more surreal.

Looking back I realize with awe how these lessons come to show where the true power is. Your only real job is to be like that captain who knows he is the spiritual fire. Your mates are your mental ideas, physical senses, and emotions. If you condition them to obey you at all times then, when life’s storm tosses your boat, these mates will obey your spiritual fire — immediately.