Islands of Trash

The wind swirls through the room.  Dirt and old skin cells combine with human hair and cat fur, creating drifts and tangles that rush around in the air flows, collecting more of its kind in a puffy mass light enough to float away.  I watch idly as nature orders herself, as substance attracts substance, and wonder how big this ball of fluff would grow if left to itself.

Apparently in the centre of each big ocean there is an island of trash, a giant dust bunny trapped between deep sea currents. In the pacific they say it is as big as Texas.  I believe this must be true.

I have seen it on a micro scale, drifts of human debris urged together by the currents, forming long lines of colour in a swirling grey sea.  After a big storm you see it piled high on our finest beaches.  A recent boat ride through the beautiful Sumidero canyon landed me in the centre of a simmering scum of Mexico's finest refuse.  They clear it every year, but even so, I looked across a floating landscape, buoyant with water bottles and divided by a thin channel through which our boat crept like a cruiseliner along cliffs of rubbish.  Plastic floats, did you know that? And like attracts like.

So I often imagine what it must be like out there.  The oceans of the world, scooping up our rejected goods to deposit in the centre of a giant, slow-moving whirlpool of water.  Local eddy currents like reaching hands, collecting up smaller drifts and dumping it with the rest. 

The whole thing gradually twists into itself, fishing nets winding around soft drinks bottles and toiletry containers, bleached white by sea and sun, to form a colossal raft, punctured with the hard edges of old refrigerators and fractured household items, strengthened by fibres of seaweed, nourished by rotting wood and the guano of sea birds.  The island organises itself to the extent that floating coconuts, captured in the tangle, occasionally find enough nutrition to shoot up baby palms.  The smaller items break down with every wave, filling in the spaces with fragments of foil and wrappers and fermenting sea vegetables, consolidating the ecosystem. 

The island grows bigger and bigger with every swirl of its great mass, drawing more and more into its tangled density.  Like a giant magnet for plastic. 

It is truly a display of our species' development, that we create new continents with just our waste. It must be magnificent.

As above, so below. Whether we are talking about man-made refuse in the centre of the sea or organic droppings in a drafty room, we see simply nature's tendency to attract itself.  Waves move in lines but currents swirl in spirals.  Combinations of small currents form turbulence, unpredictable interference of wave formations that generates erratic local effects.  On a larger scale these turbulences move in macro spirals, forming calm apexes like the centre of a hurricane.  So waves move uniformly amidst erratic turbulence over deep, spiralling currents. And under the action of waves in a current, matter collects itself.

Rivers are shaped in this way over time - suspended matter in water will be carried along uniformly until it reaches some eddy in the current - caused perhaps by a large rock, or a gentle curve on the shore.  If the current around this obstacle causes the waves to slow down enough, the suspended matter will be deposited.  Thus curves in a river are exaggerated over time,  dust bunnies collect in  dirty, drafty rooms, and islands grow in the centres of great oceans.

I too, am subject to eddies in currents, albeit of a more subtle kind.  If what is outside reflects what is inside, then I too must experience life in waves.  In actuality, when I step out of the pointed perspective of this moment and into the wider perspective of the greater consciousness, the stream of my life has indeed behaved just like the nature that holds it.  Events express themselves in swirls and eddies, marked by larger scale currents that have carried me from place to place along flows of activity and synchronicity. 

And even when stuck in this little body and this little mind, I am still able to recognise times where I have slowed, grown stagnant, been dumped onto a shoreline along with the debris of that moment.  And haven't there been times where I was picked up in the rush and promise of a new current - times when everything around me seemed to be filled with movement also, where everything seemed flow along together, to the same place, aligned?

On the sea of consciousness we are simply concentrations of energy, masses of etheric substance bobbing through the dimensions.  We too, swirl. We too, draw things to us through the simple act of undulation in this ocean of existence.  It is the way of the world, for things with mass to be carried along waves of movement, congregating in the centres of eddies in these currents, somehow conglomerating in islands of increasing density. 

What I see in the island of trash is a reflection of the island of me as a human, drawing in objects and ideas and other humans, other concentrations of energy, who are floating along the same currents as me. 

A big storm can send all but the most tightly bound items flying away from me in upheaval.  And inertia can cause me to become stuck in the centre of the hurricane, or tangled in an island of trash, unable to move under the unbearable bindings of life.

So what am I to do? For when this happens, when I become weighed down by the attachments of my life, I risk waiting for some other force to blow through and dissipate my safe little island, or else present myself with the need to explode myself out of this tangle.  And what do I do when I am caught in the erratic turbulence of several currents coming together at once?  Simply pull my limbs in and my head down and hope I come out unharmed?

One thing is for certain; these currents move us.  When I feel a new one, I know, for I am literally swept off my feet, a dazzlingly swift rush of activity in which everything is poised at my reach and nothing feels effortful.  I know what it feels like to be taken and to panic at the sight of familiarity disappearing slowly in my wake.  I know what it is to scrabble and resist and nearly drown trying to get back to a former island.

But, no matter how many times new currents ease us from the flotsam, inevitably we will congeal with the things around us.  Some of life's strands are just too strong to break.  And so wherever we drift, we drift with others. The concentrations of energy become more dense with time.  We collect.

Over life I collect millions and billions of these other densities, until by the time I die I will be a vast island of being, buoyant with ideas, expansive with the debris of consciousness.  I will have other people attached to me with trails of shared experience, wound together in the net of random interaction.  I will have products of my own fermentation, bubbling around me, and tendrils of love and resentment anchoring me to islands of past events.  I will find myself locked into items seemingly stranded in the sea of space-time.  In energetic terms I could find myself heavier than the world, a universe in myself.

So what can I do? 

Simply relish the rush of the river that carries me, and learn to recognise the currents. 

Be careful what I collect.  Beware the bonds that glue me to life's trash, and cherish the other beings that make my drifting pleasurable. 

And keep flowing.  Always, always keep flowing.

JIYA JULIA

Jiya works in the field of self-empowerment, particularly through creative expression, helping people to identify their challenges and fulfill their full potential.  A founder of international organization Kula Collective, Jiya offers her retreats around the world.