Your Daily Miracle: Salmon Intuition

Anyone else out there want a road map?

I pride myself on being able to roll with each wave that life brings down the sand, but today I'll admit it: I'd love to have a map to lead me through the next ten, eleven, twelve months.  I'd like to know what decisions will render what consequences, what will appear around a hairpin bend, whether the road will be straight or curvy or lead us right off a cliff.

And that brings me around to the only option any of us ever have: trust in the unknown.  Drive into the fog, watch the dotted line down the middle of the road, and if tail lights appear in front of you, all the better.

Perhaps trusting in the unknown is not as hard as the choices that lie littered all over the road--swerve to miss the squirrel, turn right at the tree with the brilliant orange leaves, turn around at the general store if you've gone too far.

Goodness knows I've had my share of being hopelessly lost on any number of roads--the other day on the way to Costco (without the GPS; I've driven there, for heaven's sakes, so many times!), I took several wrong turns that transformed a fifteen-minute jaunt into a forty-five minute crawl.  You'd think I'd be all good with uncertainty and unfamiliar parking lots.

So two days ago when Martin asked me to drive to Fish Park, a place I'd never been to nor had received directions for, I thought he was crazy.  "You know, I have little to no idea where I'm going," I said, turning the key in the ignition.

"That's okay," he said.  "Just follow your intuition."

"You're off your rocker," I said, as I swung onto our neighborhood street.  "You may as well tell me to follow my intuition to BoogaBooga, since I also have no idea where that is, either."

He luxuriated in the passenger's seat and said little as I turned on my blinker.  Turn after turn, he'd murmur, "Good choice,"  and only until I'd successfully meandered to the other side of town did he finally say, "Is your intuition telling you to get in the right-hand lane?  I thought so!"

And there was Fish Park, where we piled out of the car and followed trails over a river that empties from Liberty Bay and continually gets sweeter as the salmon fight their plodding way upstream to lay their eggs and die. 

We leaned over a bridge railing as a salmon glinted silver in the cloudy depths below us.  She was having a tough time though the tide was high; her whole body undulated against the current and she lost distance again and again.  She tipped her head up and surfaced, gulping air.  There would be no time to rest, only a long, slow journey.  I felt sorry for a fish for the first time in my life.  But her sense of direction was impressive.  From birth, she'd had a map folded inside of her, and when it was just the right time, the map unfurled inside and gave her the directions to lead her just where she needed to go.  A salmon's intuition. 

Part of me wants her sense of direction and part of me despairs at her utter lack of choices.  But then I think about the odd intuition that led me to Fish Park, when I had little to no idea of where I was going.  It was a good thing, a magic feeling. 

Maybe life is a mix of both.  Ideally there's a divine intuition that guides us if we relax enough to trust it.  Ideally there are choices.  And ideally there is a really wonderful surprising destination, time after time, a place where the brackish water runs sweet.

I trust so.