Story by Tor Pinney                                                                                                                                        Back to List of Tor's Tales

                  

A TIME OF MIRACLES
© 2005 Tor Pinney - All Rights Reserved

 

This tale may have begun with the first thoughtful authors I read; Kahlil Gibran, Black Elk, Herman Hesse, Carlos Castenada, Yogananda, Alan Watts, Maharishi. Or maybe it was when I learned to practice Transcendental Meditation, when I was 19 or 20. Yes, that must have been the real beginning. No-mind meditation set the stage for what followed, priming me with doses of consciousness. I knew - first-hand, not because someone said so - that there was something, no-thing. Yet, little did I imagine then how huge, how magical how personal, and how much fun It could be.
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1971, early 20’s, long-haired and living in Atlanta, my youthful career in show business already winding down and my future up for grabs. I had an obsessive dream to live aboard a sailboat and travel the world, but had no idea where the money was going to come from. Nothing I'd done so far had panned out financially. In fact, I’d hit a low point just then and was casting about for my next move. Among the few options I saw available to me, the most attractive, the most potentially lucrative was... Well, let's just say it was contrary to the laws of that time and place. Way contrary, and I wasn’t feeling entirely comfortable with it. But at the moment I wasn’t seeing any attractive alternatives.

I didn’t own a car back then, but I loved to travel and was a master hitchhiker. I thought nothing of hittin' the road and hitching a thousand miles to visit someone. In those days, it was actually a pretty cool thing to do, full of adventures and interesting characters. It wasn't at all unusual, then, that I decided to hitchhike up to New York, where I had a few contacts that might help me with the new enterprise I was contemplating.

I-95 somewhere in southern Virginia, waiting in the rain for my next ride, late in the day and getting cold: So, I was particularly grateful when a scruffy Volkswagen Beetle pulled over to pick me up. However, the instant I opened the door I knew I was in for a tedious time. “Praise the Lord!” the longhaired young driver sang out even before I’d gotten in. “Come on in out of the rain, brother.”

Oh, brother, I thought.

The reborn Christian behind the wheel played his part with gusto, prattling on and on about the Greatness of God and His Word in the Bible, as the old VW rattled its way up the interstate. Whatever, I was just glad to be out of the rain, warm and dry and moving in the right direction. And when this fellow offered me a couch to crash on for the night at his Christian commune, I readily accepted.

Soon I was bedding down in a big old house that he shared with half a dozen other reborn hippies, all of them praising the Lord for the opportunity to take in a stranger for night, it being such a biblical thing to do. I guessed they were racking up heavenly points.

All this leads to something my driver said to me the next morning as he delivered me to the Interstate on-ramp. “Brother,” he said, “I sense that you’re deeply troubled about something and I believe the Lord sent you to me for a reason. Whatever it is that’s wrong in your life, if you get to where you don’t know what to do and see no place to turn, let me tell you a prayer that’ll turn things around for you - in an instant!” I was getting antsy to get out of the car and be on my way, but the guy had been so hospitable. So, I stayed and let him speak.

“Here’s what you do. You just say to God, ‘Lord I’m a sinner and I am lost. I don’t know what to do to fix my life. I just can’t seem to do it by myself. I need you to help me. Father, please come into my life and my heart. I surrender my will to yours; I’ll do whatever you tell me to do. Please, God, come in and show me what to do.’” As he finished his “Amen,” I was opening the door and thanking him for the ride and the sofa, glad to be away from the preaching, and within minutes another car picked me up and took me straight through to New York, nonstop.

Things didn’t flow so well in New York; I left a week later with just a couple of weak contacts. Actually, my heart just wasn’t into that shady project anymore, and I got out onto I-95 that morning with Georgia on my mind.

Fifteen hours later I was standing on the shoulder of Interstate 85 somewhere in rural South Carolina, where my last ride had dropped me off. It was a little past midnight, perfectly clear and moonless; the stars brilliant and close and infinite. There was little traffic on the highway at that hour, and the occasional car or truck that did come along just roared on by, probably not even seeing me hitchhiking on the road's dark shoulder.

I could have camped in some nearby woods for the night, but I wasn’t all that tired and I felt like getting home, even though I didn’t know what I was going to do when I got there. I had no money and no job and I was on the verge of a breakup with my girlfriend. I didn’t have the contacts I’d gone to New York for and didn’t really want to pursue that anymore. So there I was, standing on a dark highway going nowhere, with nothing promising in my life and feeling about as low as I ever had.

Then I remembered what that Jesus freak had said; the prayer he’d felt compelled to teach me before we parted. I’d never believed in praying or in that kind of personal God, but I knew from the past few years of practicing meditation that there is something awesome, a state infinitely welcoming beyond or behind this physical world. I'd often entered this place during deep meditation; I had a sense that it’s everywhere, inside, outside and throughout everything.

I speculated that this realm or state of being or energy is the base substance, the cosmic ingredient from which all things are made, a sort of common denominator, the immaterial stuff from which neutrons and electrons are constructed and the energy that binds and animates them; even the empty space in between them. It even occurred to me that if this all-ness permeates everything, is everywhere and in everything, then it isn’t so farfetched to suppose that it might actually be conscious and cognizant. That's not such a quantum leap of faith considering the obvious organization of nature and the cosmos. And, I thought, if it were conscious, this universal, omnipresent Energy/Stuff, then it certainly should be capable of understanding and responding to the English language. And in that instant I concluded that praying could actually be a way of speaking to all of creation. It just might not be as vain as I had always thought.

Anyway, my life was a mess, nobody was around and I had nothing to lose, so I stood there on that empty highway and for the first time in my life I prayed, sincerely and from the heart, just the way that Christian hippy had taught me. “Lord,” I said out loud, “I am lost and I don’t know what to do to fix my life. I’m not going to do this business deal. I can feel it's the wrong way to go. But I don’t know what else to do. I need help. Please, God, let me into your heart and come into mine. Come into my life and show me what to do. I surrender my will to yours. God, show me what to do now and I’ll do it.”

What happened next has stayed with me all these decades since. I must have had my arms raised because I instantly felt an enormous surge of power, an inconceivably huge energy flow into and through them and into my body. It was as if I had grabbed hold of a 440-volt electric cable, only the energy was benign and blissfully fulfilling, and it just poured into me until I was trembling with it. “Oh, God,” was all I could think or say. This huge, wonderful power filled me up and kept on coming. I’d never felt anything remotely like it before in my life.

After some time I became aware again of where I was and I felt - I knew! - that God, the Spirit, the Cosmic Consciousness, the Father Creator; That Which Is; whatever you want to call it - had responded to my spoken prayer, directly and positively. I knew at that moment that I was connected to it and it was with me, filling me. That was the beginning of my time of miracles and they began immediately, albeit without fanfare.

I felt so unimaginably wonderful right then that I didn’t much care whether I got a ride that night or not, but within a minute or two after all this had transpired I heard the unmistakable whine of a lone18-wheeler approaching from the north. Soon it came roaring down the highway; must’ve been doing 80. Now, I had caught rides from truckers before, but always at an on ramp where they aren’t even out of second gear yet. I’d never seen one pull over for a hitchhiker once he was traveling at full speed, but this trucker caught sight of me in his headlights, braked hard and pulled onto the shoulder as if on cue, and I grabbed my pack and ran to him. As I climbed up into the cab he drawled, “I’m goin’ straight through to Atlanta tonight, good buddy. How ‘bout you?”

When I got home things immediately started falling into place, seemingly of their own accord. First, I learned that a key player in my illicit business plan had decided to back out. That enterprise was not going to happen, and so I wasn’t letting anyone down by my earlier decision to pass on it. Then I told my girlfriend that I felt we had grown apart and maybe it was time to go our separate ways, and set a date to move out of our shared apartment. Next, a freak ice storm hit Georgia, knocking down trees and branches all over Atlanta. I grabbed a saw and an axe and spent a week earning good money clearing people’s yards for them. In no time I had a little wad of cash.

And God started talking to me. Not in a great, booming voice from the sky, but quietly, inside my head, in a voice that was my own and yet completely separate from me - and infinitely wiser. One of the first things God said to me was, “If you want to be on sailboats so badly, then be on sailboats. Go!”

It was so obvious. Why hadn’t I thought of it before? Right then I decided to move to the coast and start being around boats. But first I needed a vehicle to get me there, and that flowed, too, almost magically, it was so effortless. I simply happened across a faded blue 1960 International pickup truck stuck out in a field behind a gas station, for sale for $100. I felt I’d been guided to it and, thanks to the ice storm, I had the hundred dollars. So I bought it on the spot, and for as long as I owned her “Old Blue,” as I called the truck, never let me down. More on that in a minute.

So it was that on a fine spring day just a few weeks after my epiphany on I-85, I packed my meager belongings into the back of my new, ancient pickup, gave my girlfriend one last kiss goodbye, and headed towards the North Carolina coast. My general idea - I wouldn't call it a plan; by then I was way too well-connected to make plans - was to find a job with a boat builder or in a boatyard and start learning how boats are put together. However, even my "ideas" at that point were open to guidance. I was beginning to practice what I came to call the Art of Surrender, and it served me well, much better than I could have served myself.

As I proceeded along these lines, I had a strong, constant sense of connectedness with God, a feeling of being assisted and guided. By then I was talking to him – I thought of God as “him,” maybe because his voice inside me sounded like my own masculine voice. Or maybe it was just social conditioning. Anyway, I was talking to him freely and almost constantly and he was talking back. I could ask any question, anything at all, and he would answer it clearly and wisely. I would often speak out loud (but he wouldn’t) and if anyone had overhead me they surely would have thought me crazy. Maybe I was, but it was a good kind of crazy and I felt wonderful. I was aware of God’s energy most of the time now. It was a background presence that I could call forward just by paying attention to it.

God, Old Blue and I stuck to secondary highways, working our way northeast out of Georgia and into the Carolinas, taking our time, stopping, going and detouring as whim dictated. One afternoon I spotted a revival tent pitched alongside the road with a lot of cars parked around it, and on impulse pulled over and went in. It was a lively congregation of rural Southerners, whites and coloreds together, carrying on in ways I’d never seen before. A ragtag band was banging out upbeat country hymns from a makeshift stage and people clapped their hands and sang along. Some folks, taken by the spirit, staggered into the isles and danced jigs or just flailed their arms around, eyes rolled back, one or two of them even speaking in tongues. It was a wild, primitive kind of celebration and I knew they really were filled with some of that incredible energy I’d felt back on I-85. They just had a different way of tapping into it, different ways of expressing it.

As I said earlier, my pickup, Old Blue, never let me down. But she did tease me once or twice. One day we were cruising through farm country far from any town when I realized the fuel gauge was reading nearly empty. I kept hoping I’d come across a gas station, but as the needle bottomed out things didn’t look promising. When the engine finally did sputter and die we were at the top of a rise surrounded by farmland, a couple of houses just visible in the far distance. I let her coast downhill and as we began to decelerate we rounded a bend in the road and guess what I saw. Yep, there sat a little country store with a gas pump out front, probably the only one in the whole county. With her last ounce of momentum, Old Blue rolled into the driveway and came to a halt, unaided, exactly alongside the pump. Hallelujah! How many times in your life does that happen? I was learning that miracles don’t always come with the grandeur of a parting sea. Sometimes they’re just little things working out when it doesn’t seem likely. Still, my miracles were about to become, if not spectacular, at least more blatant.

I found my way to a back road boatyard outside Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina. Approaching the owner – a big, burly man with a hard manner but, as I eventually discovered, a good heart – I asked for a job, telling him I didn’t know much about boats yet, but wanted to learn all about them from the bottom up. Well, that’s what he had in mind, too, and soon I was scraping and painting boat bottoms in the haul-out slip for minimum wage.

At first I lived in Old Blue there at the yard, sleeping in the open truck bed. But that wasn’t so comfortable when it rained, so once I’d gotten a couple of paychecks I rented a cottage a few miles away on a dirt road. This cottage was one of several that the old landlady was renting out, and she’d mentioned there were some young married couples further down the lane. Sure enough, each morning I began noticing a really good looking woman about my age walk past my place to the mail boxes at the head of the road, and back again. Well, I was lonely for female company since leaving my girlfriend in Atlanta. So, one day when this cutie walked by I decided I would go out and talk to her when she passed again on her way back to her cottage. I confess my intentions were not entirely honorable, even though I knew she was married.

Hey, I never said I was a saint.

So there I was, sweeping the floor of my cottage, waiting for her to come back from the mailboxes, thinking of a good opening line to strike up a conversation. No sooner did I make that decision to approach her than I noticed something glitter in the little pile of dirt & dust I was pushing with the broom. Automatically, I reachedt down and picked up the shiny object to see what it was. There in my hand was a small, flat bit of gold, a little charm, like from a charm bracelet, and it had writing on it. What it said was, “Thou Shalt Not Covet Thy Neighbor’s Wife,” and as I read it I felt the distinctive tingle of that energy presence I was coming to know so well. I can feel it now just recounting the story. I mean, how much more direct can a message be? Needless to say, I did not speak to that married woman when she passed by a few minutes later, heading back to her cottage. When God tells you straight out not to mess around, you best listen.

We often got into very lengthy discussions, God and I. Of course, it would be easy for an outsider to write this off as my own wishful (or whacko) thinking, or hallucinations, or maybe even schizophrenia - if it weren’t for all those inexplicable physical manifestations, the "little miracles," that so often accompanied these dialogues.

For example, one time I was walking on an empty ocean beach that stretched to the horizon in both directions, talking to God about how I missed the girlfriend I'd left in Atlanta, and maybe I should give her a call and see if she’d like to join me here. God replied, “If you want to keep her that much, marry her,” and in that instant I saw another glint of something shiny at my feet, this time all but buried in the beach sand, and I picked it up. Once again it was gold, this time a wedding band! I had kicked up a gold ring buried in the sand on a deserted 50-mile beach at the very instant that God said, “Marry her.” Now, you tell me, what are the odds of that happening coincidentally? A hundred trillion to one, maybe? On a lucky day?

Anyway, I thought about it and concluded that, no, I’m not ready to take it that far with that girl and I didn’t call her. I did hang onto the ring as a keepsake, but it has long since disappeared. I have no idea where or when I lost it. I do, however, still have the Thou Shalt Not Covet Thy Neighbor’s Wife charm, a bit of physical proof (to me, at least) that I didn’t imagine all this stuff.

Another day out on the beach, still empty in the cool, windy spring weather, I sat in the sand facing the sea, chatting with God about this and that. Finally, I said out loud, “I’m bored. I’d sure like something to do.” No sooner had I spoken the words than a wave, somewhat larger than the others I’d been watching break on the shore, came tumbling in with a roar. I realized as it broke that it might reach up to where I sat, so I stood up to avoid getting my bottom soaked. It was then I spotted something colorful in the foaming crest and as I stood there, the wave washed up onto the beach within an inch or two of my toes and deposited a Frisbee at my feet. Then the sea receded and the ocean’s wave pattern returned to normal. I scooped up the Frisbee, laughed and shouted, “Thank you!” and spent the next half hour or so flinging the saucer high into the sea breeze, running to catch it as it returned to me, boomerang-style. When I’d had enough I spun it out into the ocean whence it had come and left the beach feeling positively buoyant.

These kinds of little miracles were happening to me so regularly that they began to seem almost normal. Sometimes it would just be the way things flowed for me; my life seemed to move along easily and without resistance. Of course, the in-your-face miracles were the most impressive, and there were lots of those, too.

Towards the end of that first summer, I sold Old Blue and signed onto a southbound sailboat as crew. That carried me to Fort Lauderdale, where I worked briefly on a construction site. Happily, this God I was getting to know wasn’t at all self-righteous, judgmental or prudish. One afternoon I was walking along a sidewalk, once again feeling lonely for the company of a woman, and so I said, “God, won’t you please send me a woman, at least for the night?” I reached the street corner just as I finished making this request, and as a car pulled up and stopped at the stop sign there. Looking up, I saw a pretty girl looking back at me from the driver’s seat, smiling, and she said, “Hey, you need a ride somewhere?” Just like that, so help me…God, and she and I did wind up spending a rewarding night together.

This is not to say God gave me everything I asked for. I suppose he always answered me, but sometimes the answer was no. This seemed to be the case with the sailboat I so desperately craved, although even that came to me in time and in an unorthodox manner.

My favorite miracle happened in Coconut Grove, a village on the south side of Miami that was a bohemian community in those days. When I first drifted into town I found my way onto a group of small islands just off the city marina. They were entirely unpopulated when I got there because, I learned through the grapevine, the police had just gone out a week or two before and run off all the hippies that had been squatting there. So my timing was perfect. I had the islands all to myself and the police never dreamed anyone would be brazen enough to move in so soon after their recent sweep. For my part, I once again had no money so renting a room was not an option. I found an ideal spot at the outer end of the outermost island, erected a driftwood lean-to, and called it home for the next three months. During that time, no one ever bothered me or my meager belongings.

The way things were flowing for me in those days I was grateful if not particularly surprised when a friend volunteered to introduce me to the banquet manager at the Coconut Grove Hotel. The manager, a stuffy but decent Austrian fellow, in turn offered me a much-needed job as a waiter, saying I could start later that week. All I had to do was show up with a white shirt and black trousers, bowtie, shoes and socks. The hotel would provide the short waiter’s jacket and an employees’ locker room in which I could shower and change before work. Great, now all I had to do was get the required outfit…with the $2.85 in my pocket that represented my total net worth at that time.

I hitchhiked to downtown Miami (to save the bus fare) and went to a Goodwill store. There I found a handsome tuxedo shirt, fitted black slacks, socks and a bowtie for a grand total of $2.50. But there was no way I could afford a pair of shoes, even used ones from Goodwill.

Now, the way my islands were positioned, to go home I had to first catch a dinghy ride from the dock from one of the sailors heading out to the anchorage. They would drop me off on what was called the careening beach, across a narrow channel from the marina’s Pier 1. From there I would traverse the tiny first island, walk along a second short beach to a partially-submerged sandbar that I’d wade across to reach the larger outer island. There I followed a padded path for a few minutes through tall Australian pines to the outermost tip of that island and my campsite, where I enjoyed peace, privacy and panoramic views of Biscayne Bay and the uppermost Florida keys. Four miles to the north, downtown Miami gleamed in the sun like a giant, white ice cream cake.

Returning from the Goodwill store, I got dropped off on the first beach. As I walked across the little island carrying my small bundle of waiter’s clothes I was fretting about the shoes I needed and couldn’t afford. I really wanted that job, but they weren’t likely to overlook the worn flip-flops that were my only footwear. My mind was fully occupied with this dilemma when I stepped out onto the second beach, but there I spotted something that brought my attention careening into the present moment and to this day it gives me a little chilly thrill when I think about it. There, smack in the middle of the crescent beach, sitting side by side in the sand, clean and perfectly dry, was a pair of black leather shoes, exactly the kind of shoes a hotel banquet waiter might wear. I looked around. No one was there, not anywhere. I was alone on the island. The shoes sat there in the middle of the beach like a prop, waiting. Finally, I approached and slipped my foot into one of them. Cinderella never knew such a perfect fit! These shoes could have been custom made for my doublewide feet (and for all I know, they were). Now, try to tell me God didn’t put those shoes there at that very moment just for me. Halleluiah one more time! Can I get an amen!

I took the shoes and got the job. For months after that I worked banquets, soon earning enough money to buy first a little lateen-rigged skiff with which I could commute to my island and practice sailing on the bay, and eventually my first live-aboard sailboat, Thumper. I worked long hours on my feet and I can honestly say those shoes were the best fitting and most comfortable I have ever owned.

Gradually my amazing relationship with God faded. I wasn’t aware of it happening. It didn’t just stop one day, but sort of trailed off. Maybe I was taking it so much for granted that I stopped doing something I needed to do to keep it going. Maybe I became distracted by my pursuit of sailboats and, later, my pursuit of money for better sailboats. Maybe God had just had enough of me. I don’t know. Somewhere along the way we stopped chatting and the miracles stopped happening.

Or maybe they didn’t really stop. Maybe I just stopped noticing them.

These stories I’ve related are only a few examples of the magical things that happened to me almost daily while I was living in that special state of grace. Were they really miracles? Was the Universal Spirit, God Himself, actually cruising around with me, chatting and manifesting cool things for my amusement? Or were all these events just quaint coincidences despite their incredible timing and frequency? I know what I think. I can only guess what various readers might conclude. No matter. We all live our own realities. And anyway, we’ll probably find out eventually.

In all these years I’ve only told this tale to a couple of people. I come from a family of atheists so I wasn’t inclined to share it with them, and while most of my friends probably believe in something, none are particularly religious. That’s all right with me. I don’t care much for any of the so-called organized religions. I suspect they’ve done more harm in this world than good over the centuries, and current events do nothing to improve this opinion.

For my part, I’ve never felt called upon to preach about my experiences. It’s something that happened to me and I offer it as simply that. The reason I finally wrote it down now is that I believe I’m beginning to recapture some of that magic again, some of that one-on-one relationship with God. It’s not as strong yet as it was back in the day, the miracles aren’t as blatant, but I’m starting to notice them again and that’s a start. Perhaps more will come. Meanwhile, I’m working on paying attention, being present, and practicing meditation and the art of surrender to the extent that my consciousness enables me. For now it’s enough just to know I’m still connected.

I’ve never enjoyed my life more than when I lived with that spirit, that amazing grace I knew during my time of miracles. If I’m finally getting back to that now, then I pray I hang onto it this time.

Can I get an amen?

~ End ~

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