Saturday, July 11, 2009

The Fortune Teller

Today you could feel the storm coming the moment you got up. The air was a hot breeze, whipping the palm trees into frenzy with heavy looking storm clouds overhead. But Natalia and I still did our morning ritual of Mamitupu beach yoga, because it was one of our favorite things and helped us start the day out fresh.

We have today and one more full day left on our dream island, so we wanted to maximize our time. We did many things, such as going to an abandoned island with my friends and going to a carnival at the grade school. But the most interesting thing today was our meeting with the Nele. A Nele is a Kuna fortune teller/ shaman / spiritual leader, and several days before we had asked questions of the Nele about our life, and he had drunk tea and smoked cacao and talked with his wooden spirit dolls before he went to sleep and asked them about us and imagined and read our future in his dreams.

I was really excited and nervous to hear what he had to say. I am not going to base my life around his prediction, but it is definitely interesting and a learning experience. So when he walked into our cabana area I stopped playing toss with all the kids and sat respectfully while he spewed beautiful Kuna words. His words were then translated to Spanish and here is the gist of what he predicted for my life:

I will go to College and love it. It will be hard, and he does not know what I will study but whatever I focus on I will have a passion and love for many years after. I will have horrible headaches in the beginning of college but if I keep taking my vitamins all my health problems should go away and new ones should not appear. My family problems from now on will not be solved in court they will be solved heart to heart and someone should come to you soon apologizing about what happened in the past. Lastly he said, I will find a man soon in my life, that he will be here to stay and that with that man I will have four children, two boys and two girls. In closing he said, overall your life will be smooth and you will love it all as long as you keep your body, and especially your blood, strong.

This was fascinating for me, because even though I only asked him about my future in school and in my career, he gave me guidance about unasked questions I have about my family and about my relationships in the future. I feel really good all of what the Nele said about my future and family, but the idea of four children of my own creation is a lot for me to handle at this point in my life!

After we received the forecast of our futures, Natalia, Pablo, Jacinto, Diggy (my friend) and I went to another deserted island and laid on the beach, collected sea shells and ate coconuts. We returned just when the storm began coming in full force.

Later that night we were woken from our slumber by the loudest lightning and thunder and rain we had heard in our lives. Every night there had been tons of rain and noise and light, but tonight it was ridiculously intense. Natalia and I could not sleep. The thunder shook our bed, the lightning was brighter than daytime, and the cracking and pounding sound of the thunder sounded like it was cracking on top of our heads. We left our cabana and snuggled in the hammock, under the shelter of the look-out hut, and ooh-ed and awed at the magnificent power of nature. I fell asleep after hours of watching nature’s opera, fading away into the pounding rain and the trickling ocean.

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