The Sound of the Sea

The Sound of the Sea by Chris Green

Your thoughts are the architects of your destiny, the man in the seat opposite me says. I find myself unable to explain why, but I feel ill at ease in his presence. He has an unusual accent that I cannot place, and his eyes seem to hit you from all directions. I feel sure I have come across him before but I can’t think where or when. I don’t imagine it would have been lately, but there again, it could easily have been, such is my temporal awareness. But it wouldn’t have been here, in the Chalice Well Gardens in Glastonbury. To the best of my knowledge, I have never been here before. I have only come here today because Gaia in the health food shop suggested that it was a sacred place offering a healing experience and I felt that was something I needed.

I’m not sure why I open up to the stranger, but I find myself telling him that I have been beside myself since Lucy left last month. Just before Christmas. It was a bolt out of the blue. We had been together for ten years. All I knew was that I had to take a break to get over it so I booked an Airbnb in Glastonbury. But I can’t stop thinking about Lucy. He tells me I need to take control of my thoughts PDQ, otherwise, things are not likely to go well for me. Feeling sorry for yourself draws in bad energy. The longer I dwell on it, the harder it will become to get back on an even keel. Once you let your spirit sink below a certain point, he says, it’s a downward spiral. No way back. He has this rule that when something calamitous happens he needs to adjust to the new circumstances within fifty-five minutes and accept them completely. Negativity encourages negativity. I need to welcome change as an opportunity for development,

He hands me a piece of scrap paper with the number of someone he says might be able to help. He does not explain in what capacity. He fires me a forbidding look which I take to mean I should know better than to expect him to elaborate, and with this, he gets up to leave.

I’ve never come across anyone called Karma before. But that’s all the note says. Karma along with a mobile phone number. Is Karma really the person’s name? It turns out it is. The brightly dressed woman with the maze of facial jewellery in Serendipity, the bohemian back-street shop I am directed to, is called Karma. It looks like she wants to sell me multicoloured merchandise, courses with shamen, and trips to Goa. The heady bouquet of essential oils coming at me and the Incredible String Band tune with the bewildering lyrics playing in the background are disorientating. So much so that I find myself asking the laid-back dude on the patchwork Chesterfield settee, wearing the purple brocade overcoat in defiance of the blistering sunshine outside about the Miracle Workshop he is advertising.

He introduces himself as Caspian and is all too keen to fill me in. Miracles, he tells me, are just a whisker away. Everyone can experience them. He tells me if I come along to the group I will learn how to connect to my source and in doing so will attain full awareness of love’s presence in my life. I will experience true joy. How could I not sign up? True joy is in short supply right in my life now, and love’s presence seems to be something I am missing. Since Lucy left I have pretty much been starved of female company. Stacey in the office somehow doesn’t seem to qualify. She might not even be a woman, but I dare not ask.

Caspian tells me the first workshop is at New Moon at Daymer Bay in Cornwall on Wednesday at 3 a.m. This sounds a little early for me, but he says he can’t change the Moon’s orbit. This is the January New Moon and there’s nothing he can do to make it any different. But being the first one of the year, it will be fortuitous. Mordros, he goes on to explain, is the Cornish word for the sound of the sea, and this is a phenomenon best appreciated at high tide in a wide bay when there is no light. The sea is the beginning of all life and Mordros represents the first step on your journey to spiritual awakening. From hereonin your sense of wonder can commence.

This sounds good to me. Without being able to put my finger on exactly what it is, for some time I have felt that I am missing out on something. With the idea that I am about to find out what it might be, I get up very early on Wednesday and take the Dacia down to Daymer Bay. A fierce westerly is howling in. The Atlantic roar is deafening. The waves are colossal. Is this perhaps the essence of the Mordros that Caspian spoke about?

As I park up, I spot the shapes of two other vehicles. I cannot make out the silhouettes of any people in them, but surely one of these must belong to Caspian, Might the other one be Joy, or have I got this bit wrong?

I have got it completely wrong. When I get out of the car, I see there are no vehicles. And why would there be on a night like this? It was nothing more than wishful thinking. Caspian presumably thought that only a fool would go down to Daymer Bay in a wild storm like the one blowing here and didn’t think he needed to bother to notify me of the change of plan, and it turns out I am that fool.

They say it’s an ill wind that blows no one any good and indeed, as I am to discover, this is such a wind. At first, such an outcome seems unlikely, but remarkably, I come out of this one well. I can’t comprehend how it happens but I find myself transported to another time and place. One moment I am in the grip of the mother of all January storms at Daymer Bay and the next I am enjoying an evening cocktail in the company of the captivating Océane at the Headland Hotel in Newquay looking out onto Fistral after a day spent on a leisurely tour of Newquay’s beaches in the Spring sunshine, watching the surfers making the most of the of Cornwall’s seasonal surf’s up. By anyone’s reckoning an astonishing development. And to a novice like me, a puzzler for sure.

I take a look around me. Am I really here, or is it someone else? I do the five-sense test and maybe the sixth sense, just to be sure. Time has clearly passed, and logic tells me that something pretty dramatic must have happened in my life between the Daymer storm last winter and tonight’s clear April sky, but for some unexplainable reason, I have no access to this information. There are no records that might help. Nothing on the laptop for the missing period. No messages or mail. No appointments or bank transactions. No testimonials. My activity or whereabouts for these three months are blank. My consciousness has somehow made the leap from one time and place to the other.

I can hardly relate to the heartache I experienced after Lucy left. The bad stuff from that time has all but been erased. I take in my new situation with considerable relish. It seems a perfect place to be at a perfect time with a perfect companion. There is a clear sky and the stars are bursting into life. All is well in the firmament.

‘There are thousands of stars tonight, Matt,’ Océane says. ‘But where is the moon?’

‘It’s a New Moon,’ I say. ‘That’s why you cannot see it.’

‘Is that why the waves were big today?’ Océane asks.

‘The waves may have been big today,’ I say. ‘But the biggest ones occur two days before and after the New Moon and Full Moon. We still have a treat in store. Sennen Cove would be a good place for us to catch them.’’

All may be well now, but where has this change of perception come from? Is it the legacy of my meditation in the Chalice Well Gardens? Of the intentions I may have put in place? Unlikely. That would be too improbable a connection. Is the sorcery of the mysterious stranger with the askant gaze who handed me the piece of paper? Did it have something to do with Karma in Serendipity or Caspian and the promise of his Miracle Workshop, even though this did not appear to take place? Might it be attributed to the power of Mordros or the occult powers of the New Moon? Perhaps we rely on the moon more than we realise to see what is going on around us and when we see nothing, we occupy some kind of temporal void.

Overthinking is something we are all too ready to do. From an early age, we are taught to record and analyse. Examine and validate. Challenge and reevaluate. Over and over. But why? Why should I even be curious about how or why? It’s not the time for questions. Isn’t it enough to know that, whatever the explanation, when things seem to be working out well, go with it and be thankful? Surely, I should be counting my chickens with the present outcome.

This leads me to wonder if there might be a way for some entrepreneurial maverick with an understanding of psychological perspectives to develop this random time leap into a life skill. Along the fifty-five-minutes lines. Think of the potential. There’s a huge untapped market of all those who, unlike GlastoGuide, find themselves unable to adjust to adverse new circumstances in fifty-five minutes but would like to learn how. A kind of Zen mentalist magician’s NLP on Acid, universally available. Everyone with an unresolved issue would want a piece. It would put an end to the expensive therapies with pretentious names you see advertised in lifestyle magazines. It would be curtains for all the sleight-of-hand charlatans with fancy addresses that weekend neurotics are presently taken in by.

But I do not expect I will wonder about it for long. If the subject should come up in conversation, I might think to mention the idea, but otherwise, I’ll continue celebrating Mordros, the sound of the sea, in my comfortable surroundings for as long as fortune allows.

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