Dolphin Alien Joy

The week before lockdown in Los Angeles, I was in Hawaii attending a metaphysical dolphin seminar led by Joan Ocean, a  telepathic dolphin mystic who has swam with dolphins for the past 30 years and claims to have lived with Sasquatches in the woods of Oklahoma for six years to boot. And you thought you were RANDOM for loving Target. I had read about Joan’s seminar in  the book, Voices In the Ocean by Susan Casey and was determined to go ever since. It was under the guise of research for a project, but I really just needed it. LA had become like riding a ferris wheel. I was continually seeing my life from this distant, aerial perspective, winding down the same day over and over again, and somehow ending up at LASSEN’S eating terribly expensive tuna salad. We all have our proper place on the Los Angeles carousel and it comes with a responsibility to get off when you’re too dizzy. 

I felt divorced on my flight like I was no longer going to associate with myself. After I landed in Kona, I put on what I deemed a sexy outfit of a bathing suit and shorts and went to a restaurant that I had read was a hip, local spot. I wanted to be stared at in warm light by a hot person who wouldn’t talk to me or at least eat a good fish. I realized once I got there it was a complete tourist trap and the only people ogling me was a table of 60 year old golfing tourist men and drooling babies who wanted milk from my exposed cleavage.  I ate a sugary salad  and thought about how the most meaningful conversations I had had of late were only about misery. The different layers and dysfunctions of it and mainly the general feeling that no one had any real friends. A Cat Stevens lyric kept replaying in my head “I know many fine feathered friends, but their friendliness depends on how you do.” I’m from Connecticut so Cat Stevens plays in my head a lot. 

I finally got a look towards my chest by a dark haired surfer, father of two, who glanced at me, while his kids were putting ice cream sundaes all over their faces. We made punishing eye contact, glaring at one another. “I hate you.” “I hate you too”, our eyes said. “Why do I hate you?” “ I don’t know.” “Me neither.” “Well, actually I do know.”, his eyes baited. “You’re selfish.” “Hah! No. You think you’re sacrificing because you have kids, but you’re selfish too. This isn’t working. We resent each other too much.” He smiled. “Yea, but thats how you know the sex will be good.” “That’s so depressing. Just go be a dad.” They left and I had another wine. 

The next morning, I met the group at Joan’s ranch, which is nestled deep into green Tropical farmland with donkeys, pigs, and a panoramic view of the ocean.  The ranch is located at  north latitude 19.5 degrees which according to hyper-dimensional physics, is a profound energy vortex significant for each planet in the solar system. Joan explained that at this latitude, inter-dimensional timelines meet and galactic messages from our star family can be received. “That’s nice. I’m so hungover.” I thought. 

We all wore name tags, as we quietly ate mini pretzels out of plastic bowls and made small talk.  It was mostly women from all over the world wearing tie dye sarongs. A  good handful of folks had done the seminar before, and some had even uprooted their lives and moved to Kona after their first magical week spent with Joan. There was a freaky, knowing beauty in all the people, something witchy and delightfully tender. However, I remained skeptical and worried. “Am I just an insane person? Why am I here?” I used the restroom and there was a painting of a fetus being flown by a winged dolphin to another planet. I got my answer.

We all held hands and Joan led us into a meditation. Joan has a kind, raspy voice. Her skin is leathered and tanned from all her boat trips with a perpetual snorkel tan line around her eyes so that the crystal blue of her irises shine impossibly bright like some sort of glitch. Her smile is big and persistent like the Grandmother you imagine you’d be as a child. You immediately fall in love with her energy. She is a dolphin. We held each other’s hands and shared why we were there. Some reflected that they were descendants of Lemuria, the ancient civilization that lost its war with Atlantis. Others had been to inner earth, and were hoping to find another portal. I said “research” dryly and passed the sharing stick rather quickly. Other people cried about their current life, the loss of a spouse, their urgent need to heal. As each person spoke so honestly, I felt something achey drizzle like honey into my parched heart. “Remind me to show you all my mermaid bones!” Joan said, as we closed the evening. 

  The next morning, we were on the water. I talked with a past life therapist at the front of the boat.  Our legs dangled off the head, as we glided out of the busy harbor towards open ocean. She felt familiar like the aunt who you are not close to, but who can somehow read your mind. She told me she experienced her psychic gifts as a child when rocks and plants would talk to her, but it wasn’t until her 60s that she owned her powers and stopped repressing her intuition.  She was searching for joy after losing her husband. As she peered out at the water, an airy, calm breathed through her, a woman who had been reduced to bones, but they were strong bones, full of resolve. 

We weren’t given much instruction before we spotted a big pod of dolphins. Joan told us that dolphins loved paying fetch with leaves. “You can pass it back and forth and they catch it on their fin or on their beak.” When I plunged into the water, I noticed a leaf in front of me, and immediately out of the aqua blue I saw a dolphin hurtling towards me, head on, trying to get the leaf. I felt like I was dropped into a football game as other dolphins seemed to appear out of nowhere to watch what would happen. I grabbed the leaf and swam towards the floor and then let it go. The dolphin retrieved it with it’s fin, I was amazed. It’s hard for me to write about something pleasurable, I am better at writing about the swill of good and bad feelings and how humans are prisoners to this bittersweetness, but this was just fun in a way that I had never experienced. I was in awe of their omnipresence, their playfulness. We swam with three different pods that day, they all converged a few miles out from shore. They swam in triangular formations and my favorite part was breathing with them, gasping for air above water at the same time. Their blow holes sound so human when they inhale. Some of the dolphin people there claimed no one had ever been able to photograph spinner dolphins hunting at night, which led them to assume the dolphins swam into a multidimensional portal after the sun went down. I had never heard the word “portal” so much in my entire life.

Back at the ranch, Joan showed us PowerPoints on the Andromedans, aliens from Andromeda, who usually arrive on cloud ships during rain storms. She had been in contact with them for decades as well as the Pleiadians, star beings from the Pleiades who all look kinda like Kate Moss.  She talked about how dolphins are a vessel to these other alien realms and how they were sent here to guide humans to evolve. She claimed that a dolphin showed her how it could swim through other dolphins and led her to a vortex in the ocean. Once inside the vortex, Joan says that she looked down and could no longer see her body. I wondered about all this. I don’t think Joan is out of her mind at all. In fact, she is very normal outside of this talk. She drank Diet Coke and laughed a lot, and I saw a VHS of the movie STEP MOM with Julia Roberts on her shelf. That means you are normal. One primary belief that Joan  said rather casually: “Your imagination makes things real, not appear real, and the more you use it, the more you can make reality.” This made everything make a lot more sense and made me more open to listening to all this new...information.

I wondered if the only thing really causing any internal conflict in receiving Joan’s point of view was rhetoric. Joan talks to elves and dragons and Sasquatches. Is that really different from your Grandma praying to St. Anthony when she couldn’t find her keys? She communicates with aliens and dolphins. Is that so crazy different than being able to really know your pets thoughts and neuroses? We all find ourselves drawn to certain art more than others, but  we intellectualize and judge it instead of acknowledging the raw pull.  Joan lives in the connectedness. She told her family she worked for Green peace for years because she said she thought her being telepathic with dolphins would embarrass them. “ I tried to study them like a scientist because that would be more socially acceptable, but none of that data meant anything to me or the dolphins.”

On our day off from the seminar, I took a swim in Kealakekua Bay. It’s a really rocky beach of black stone and it hurts like hell to actually get into the water because the tide throws itself at you and you inevitably get banged up, but once in, you’re engulfed by clear blue water A friend from the seminar and I swam out. We had missed the dolphins that morning, but saw the spout of a humpback whale. You are not allowed to get close to a humpback with your boat, but if you swim up there’s nothing they can do. So we decided to swim to the mother whale, guided by the deep moans of it’s song to her baby underwater. I don’t know how to describe this either because my humor wants to undercut it. Pure bliss. You could hear the difference- the mother had a low baritone and the calf would sing the high notes. When swimming close to the surface, the song is faint, but swimming near the floor, you hear it like it’s right in front of you, vibrating in your whole body. We swam out until we got too tired and the whales had moved too far.

I was told by a lady working at a cafe that Pele, the Volcano Goddess of Hawaii, “will work with you if you let her.” This woman had been living in Arizona before relocating to Kona where she said the dolphins had shown her the truth of her heart. This all came out while I was ordering a kombucha and a rice bowl. It felt like every person I encountered lived with this reverence that allowed their lives to be transformed into this sacred simplicity that they didn’t tote around like an affectation as people do in LA. It was genuine, and under the surface and also all around if you were open to it.  I admired this energy, yet still this capitalist fat cat in my brain urged me to “Get back to work! Shake your titties and self tape that audition for the show run by that famous abuser, you piece of shit!” I felt flung into a jarring divide between my asshole conditioning and the serenity that was bubbling up in me. 

That night, Joan told us “they’re here”, exactly like the little girl in POLTERGEIST.  Only she was talking about the Andromedans. And so on a drizzly night we circled up under the stars and meditated to a recording of Joan guiding us on board an Andromedan ship.  While I didn’t see any grey people in rainbow coats blessing us like some people did, I felt a tingling feeling like my crown chakra had expanded to the moon.  The stars felt so close and afterwards everyone seemed to be in this floaty, peaceful trance like we all had participated in a life altering circle jerk, but it was deeper than that.

Now it feels, a little like a trippy dream, I had before lock down, but I keep the experience really close to my heart because it melted a lot of darkness. On the last day, we had to go around and say what we had learned the most from the trip. Some people said they had rediscovered their inner child, others had gotten over a break up, some felt more in touch with their ancestors. I wasn’t sure what I was going to say, but I thought it would probably be fluffy and go along with my “research” disguise. Instead, I broke down crying and said “everyone is so nice”. I realized this circle was the first time in a long time, I had opened myself to receive some form of unconditional love or as Joan puts it I was “dolphinated.”