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Dear Kula Diaries,
My first visit to Fire Island Lighthouse involved a lot of naked people and a search for buried treasure.
“Nude sunbathers frequent”, I said out loud as I read the sign next to the board walk. My family and I were visiting Fire Island National Seashore and lighthouse, and we had decided to walk down to the beach… which is where we saw the sign. It was a sunny September day, and my parents had taken me and my two younger sisters and my 75 year old grandmother to visit the park. My sisters and I thought the sign was pretty funny… until we walked through an opening in a sand dune and I looked directly to our left. A naked man, sitting spread eagle in a beach chair, had positioned himself directly adjacent to the path that led to the beach. At thirteen years old, my experience with naked men was (thankfully) non-existent. As a chronically guilty Catholic school child, who was unable to verbalize the word ‘sex’ without feeling like I needed to wash my mouth out with soap, I was horrified.
Immediately, I pretended to look at sea shells on the ground. “Oh, look at this shell over here!”, I yelled to my sister… pointing at absolutely nothing. My parents and grandmother emerged onto the beach behind us, and my sisters and I walked in a terrified clump as I cautiously lifted my head and looked down the shoreline… more naked people… everywhere. I had never felt so overdressed in my life — and yet, simultaneously, I felt the need to find some giant puffy jacket and bury my face in it forever. My grandmother broke the awkward silence, “EVERYBODY IS NAKED!”, she exclaimed, gleefully. I thought back to the paintings that hung in my grandmother’s basement — paintings that I loved and admired from a young age. Most of them were paintings of nude models. I had often asked her about that, “You mean… people just walk into a room naked and people paint them?” Nonchalantly she’d reply, “Of course! The human body is like art.”
Later that afternoon, we would ascend the 182 steps to the top of the Fire Island Lighthouse. Down below, I saw naked people playing volleyball on the beach, and I laughed a little bit and smiled to myself. The people below looked so tiny — like little ants, running around on the beach. As I was gazing out at the ocean, one of the docents happened to remark to me that people had found gold coins washed up on the beach at Fire Island. My heart started to race — what if I could find a piece of treasure? “Don’t get your hopes up,” the docent said, “People just don’t find gold coins.”
I begged my parents to let us go back to the beach, and they mercifully agreed to let us explore (although this time we went to the more rugged and less nude side of the beach). I walked up and down the beach that day — absolutely convinced that I was going to stumble across a gold bullion… but the docent’s words felt like a nagging splinter. People just don’t find gold coins. My eyes darted around as I picked my way through the drift wood, errant pieces of plastic litter, and dull flecks of battered sea glass. Eventually, my parents informed me that it was time to go and, reluctantly, I gave up my search. “Someday,” I thought, “I’ll find that treasure.”
Nearly 20 years later, after I had graduated the Park Ranger Academy, I was offered a seasonal job at Fire Island National Seashore. Hidden memories brushed off their dust as I thought back to my treasure hunt at Fire Island. Maybe I could finally find that gold coin. The head ranger called me on the phone and told me that the job was mine…. but there was a little problem. I had fallen in love with Washington and the mountains of the Cascades. I didn’t have a job in Washington, but if I moved to WA and worked as a Park Aide for a summer, I’d be able to complete the lengthy application and interview process. I turned the job at Fire Island down, and moved to Washington a few months later. My treasure would have to wait.
I didn’t think about Fire Island much over the years - except for an occasional opportunity that presented itself to tell the story about my grandmother on the nude beach (which is one of my favorite memories of her). In 2019, only a few months after the Kula Cloth website was ‘live’, I packed an entire week’s worth of inventory in the back of my Honda Fit and my husband Aaron and I hit the road for a trip to Death Valley National Park. At the time, our website was only getting a few orders a day, so I decided that I could do tiny ‘spurts’ of hiking at a time, and then print shipping labels and pack orders when we got back to cell service. I still remember a customer service e-mail from that week that said, “Why did my order ship from Pahrump, Nevada? Aren’t you based in WA?”. I didn’t have the heart to tell them that I had printed their shipping label in my Honda Fit using wifi from outside of a Denny’s restaurant.
And so, as Aaron and I parked my car along the highway in Death Valley and headed into the vastness of an off-trail route into a canyon, my heart felt a bit fearful about leaving my business behind. Was I foolish for disappearing into the wilderness for days at a time? Would it all come crumbling down? Was I kidding myself that I could run a business and have fun at the same time?
In an attempt to distract myself from my somewhat unfounded worries about Kula, Aaron and I started swapping fun stories about adventures we had as kids. As we picked our way through the rocky terrain, I suddenly remembered my treasure hunt for the gold coin that I had embarked upon nearly two decades prior at Fire Island Lighthouse. To be honest, I don’t even know what sparked the memory for me, but I reveled in telling Aaron about what it felt like that day to look for a real treasure. “I didn’t even find anything,” I said, “But for some reason, it just felt so exciting… like I was on a real quest to find something important.” We spent awhile talking about treasure… and as we talked, I was overwhelmed with an unshakeable knowing that I was going to find a treasure that day. I can’t explain the feeling — I just knew it. And so, we walked. The route into the canyon didn’t have a trail, and it could most accurately be described as an endless pit of trillions upon trillions of pieces of gravel and small rocks. Our destination was an area beyond a small spring, which we desperately hoped would still be there.
As we meandered through the canyon, we came to a spot in the wash where you could either continue straight through a small grove of vegetation, or go around it. I stopped for a moment, as if my body was deciding the route for me, and I continued forward. For reasons that I cannot explain to this day, I stopped about halfway through the grove and stood completely still. A feeling deep within my bones said, “Look down”. I looked down. Directly in front of my right foot, I could see something that didn’t quite look like a rock. I bent down and picked it up. It was a dime.
“I KNEW I WAS GOING TO FIND SOMETHING!!”, I shouted! I jumped around in an excited frenzy, as Aaron hurried to my location to see what I had found. “It’s a dime!”, I shrieked excitedly, “And it’s OLD!” As we continued to hike toward our backpacking destination, the impossibility of finding that dime lingered with me in ways that were unexpected and magical. Out of every possible place in the 8 mile long canyon that I could have stopped, amidst trillions of rocks… what were the chances that I stopped with my toe next to the dime? The entire world seemed to be sparkling and glowing - as if the beam of that lighthouse treasure that I had searched for so many years before had finally revealed itself to me. The treasure had been there all along, I thought to myself. That night, the temperature dropped as we watched the colors of sunset flicker on the canyon walls that surrounded our tent. We climbed into our sleeping bags, and I held the dime in my hand.
Recently, I’ve been visiting light houses again. I shared in one of my posts a few weeks ago that Aaron and I had visited the Point Robinson light house on Vashon Island, where we met Captain Joe Wubbold. Captain Joe, in his infinite wisdom, must have seen the twinkle of adventure-seeking in our eyes, because he immediately assigned us to embark upon a quest to collect stamps at local lighthouses. He handed us a paper map that had photos of lighthouses and blank spots where we could add an ink stamp, indicating that we had successfully visited the lighthouse, “Come back on December 3rd, and show me your completed map,” he ordered. We left with the map that day, and embarked upon a journey.
Over the past few weeks, we’ve visited almost half of the lighthouses on the list - we’ve travelled to Whidbey Island to visit Admiralty Head… we hiked 11 demoralizing miles on sand to visit the New Dungeness Lighthouse… and we’ve spent time chatting with the Lighthouse Keepers at Point No Point and the Mukilteo Lighthouse. Each lighthouse has its own, unique signal pattern… and each lighthouse has its own unique lens. Lighthouses are equipped with Fresnel lenses… crystalline prisms arranged in a faceted dome that reflect refracted light. While lighthouses were originally powered by fires, kerosene torches or lamps, they were relatively unsuccessful, particularly when the weather was stormy. The Fresnel lens revolutionized maritime navigation and safety with a beam that could be seen during the most tumultuous storms. The thing that I’ve found the most fascinating about the lighthouses is that the lightbulbs are relatively small compared to the beam that they send out, which can sometimes be seen for over 20 miles. To put it in very simple terms: it isn’t the bulb that makes a lighthouse beam shine bright and far… it’s the lens.
As we’ve visited these lighthouses over the past few weeks, I couldn’t help but reflect (ha! pun intended) on my lighthouse memories from my past… and how those memories and experiences continue to cast a special light into all areas of my life. Afterall, isn’t that what a lighthouse is for? To be a beacon of hope in difficult moments? A beam of light that reliably flashes and shines, as if to say, “You aren’t alone.”
It took me over 30 years to find the treasure that I had looked for that day in the sand. And I didn’t even find it in the same place and it wasn’t even gold. I had only ever had one other experience like that in my life, and it was when I was about 10 years old. The forest next to our home in Pennsylvania had been bulldozed, because a new development of condominiums was being built. When the excavators weren’t working, I would sneak over and play on the mounds of red clay that were being unearthed. One day, I was playing in the dirt, and I felt a strange feeling, “Look around… you’re going to find something.” Quickly, my eyes scanned the surface until they caught sight of a tiny edge of glass sticking out of the mud. Carefully, I dug my fingernails around the glass and slowly pulled a perfect, tiny, glass bottle out of the ground. My hands were shaking with excitement as I held it — it was obviously an antique. How long had it been buried? And how did I find it?
We each have a lens, whether we know it or not. And we each have a light. But how are we casting our beam? Are we looking around in dismay or horror at what we see… or are we seeing the art that exists within each being on this planet? Are we leaving a beach and noticing only the empty space where a treasure should be? Or are we casting a different glow - a glow that looks for and finds a treasure in each moment. A beam that can be seen far and wide as it blinks and blinks with the promise of finding gold in the most unlikely places…a beam that can turn even the most impossible dime into something precious. As Paul Coehlo writes in The Alchemist, “Remember that wherever your heart is, there you will find your treasure.”
Friends, open your hearts and cast your beams — you are the light, but most importantly, you are also the lens. You can shine as brightly as you will allow your heart to open. Look down… look up… look around… and expect the magic to happen, and the next time you find a dime… you’ll know that it isn’t just a dime. It’s a reminder of the infinite magic that lives within each of us.
Love,
Anastasia
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Glimmer
They say the light comes through
In the places we are broken
But what if the light
Is what opened the fissure to begin with
Cutting painlessly
At 186,000 miles per second
So quickly we can’t feel it
We simply notice the wound
And as we hold a bandage over it
We extinguish that light
Until it’s so dim that we forget it is there
And one day,
Scarred and bruised
We see a tiny glimmer
From a place that is now a memory of a hurt
We wish we could forget
Against our better judgement we pry it open
And it runs not with blood
But with tears
And in each tiny precious drop
A mirror of the light that never left
Like an untapped spring
Reignited
Except now it shines from within.
I love this metaphor! It should be on a t-shirt, or a Kula cloth! 😉
This was beautiful.