Message in a bottle

*finding treasure in unexpected places

Dear Kula Diaries,

Have you ever felt like you’ve spent most of your life looking for something that you’ve had all along?

I know it’s probably not just me. Humans, as a species, seem to be on a perpetual search for whatever’s next. The next thing that will make our life better. The thing that will fix our problem. The change that will improve our situation. The miracle that will finally make us happy.

We look everywhere but exactly where we are. In all of our searching and seeking and chasing… we never simply stop, and look down. Sometimes, we forget to look within.

Maybe because that’s too difficult or uncomfortable. It’s hard to take ownership for where we are, especially if we feel like we don’t like it. And yet there’s so much power in doing so, because the power to create a place that we don’t necessarily care for also gives us the power to change it.

When I was a little kid, I wanted to be an explorer… a treasure hunter. I spent years obsessed with archaeology, and I even had the chance to go on a paleontology dig at a quarry. I loved the thrill of possibility — the infinite sense that something could happen. More than anything else, I loved the feeling of finding something new and unexpected. I was always coming up with ways to make life feel like a treasure hunt, like a little archaeological expedition.

When I was about 10 or 11 years old, living in Pennsylvania, there was a huge forest next to our house that got bulldozed so a gigantic apartment complex could be built. While I was deeply sad about the loss of so many trees (particularly my favorite climbing tree, which was ripped down), I tried to see this new landscape through the lens of excitement: maybe, in its own way, it could be just as magical as the forest. On the outside looking in, it was simply a muddy construction site. The soil was made of red clay, which was prevalent in that part of Pennsylvania — and I decided to turn this construction zone into my own, personal excavation. I’d come back from exploring, my skin stained the color of rust — and my mom would hose me down outside before I was allowed to approach the house.

I still remember convincing my little sister that she needed to walk through a soupy, chocolate-milk-colored mud puddle with her bare feet to check for shards of glass so we would know it was safe to go in. (Luckily, she didn’t find any.)

This was in the era before phones, before kids were filming anything, before screen time was even a thing. I was allowed to watch TV for an hour or two on Friday nights. Otherwise, it was off limits. So during that summer that the construction site lived next to our home, I would get kicked out of the house and I spent my days exploring and creating adventures in my own mind.

On a random, unassuming day, I meandered out into that construction site while no one was working and started poking around in the mud. In my mind, I was on an important expedition looking for treasure. I didn’t have it in my head that I wanted to find anything specific, I was just looking for the fun of looking. To see what I could find.

And this is the moment that I remember so vividly that it feels like it happened yesterday:

As I poked around in the mud, I heard a sentence pop very clearly into my head: You’re about to find something. Look down. Look right here.

I was startled. But suddenly I felt completely overwhelmed with a sureness that I was on the cusp of discovering something.

In that moment, I looked down and a tiny glint caught my eye.

Excitedly, I brushed away the red clay. And from the grasp of the earth, I pulled a tiny, perfect, clear glass medicine bottle — the kind you might see in a store in the early 1900s. Definitely old. Definitely an antique.

This isn’t the exact bottle I found (I need to see if it still exists at my parent’s house), but it’s the closest image that I could find to what I discovered that day.

I sat there in the red clay holding this bottle, my hands shaking with excitement. I felt like I had discovered the most valuable treasure in the world because maybe, in a way, I had. As I held the bottle, it was if I suddenly was holding the everythingness that that bottle had ever been — the people who had used it, the liquid it had contained, the people who had made the medicine, the person who had blown the glass, the molten sand that had made it possible… the earth from which it had been born and even the stars and the cosmos beyond that. The entire complexity of the whole universe itself — contained within this tiny, muddy glass bottle that I was now, inexplicably, holding in my hand. I still remember sitting in the mud — my heart pounding in my chest — cradling this small, glass bottle and studying it with my eyes, with such a ravenous curiosity that I couldn’t imagine anything more special than this moment of my life — holding this one, discarded bottle. A bottle that, likely, had been somebody else’s trash.

I found an important message in the bottle that day, and it is one that has stayed with me for my entire life as I’ve pondered that single moment. The message wasn’t about finding the bottle. It wasn’t about discovering treasure. It was simply this: trust your intuition.

Trust that what you’re looking for is right in front of you at all times.

You don’t need to look far to find the treasure within.

And yet, over and over again throughout my life, I’ve forgotten the lesson of that bottle. I’ve gotten lost in striving. Lost in chasing. Lost in achieving.

Time and time again, I’ll see a glass bottle on a shelf in an antique store, or notice a small, worn piece of sea glass sitting in a bowl in my house and the message comes back:

It’s right here. Look down. Look within.

In those moments when I can pause the urgency — when I can stop grasping and remember to look down, deep into the vastness of my own heart — I can always find the thing I thought I didn’t have. The thing I thought was someplace else. The thing I thought was lacking.

One of the most important messages that I’ve ever received in my life was contained in a tiny glass bottle that was seemingly empty. And yet somehow, in that emptiness, the entire cosmos fit. Something I could hold in my hand.

I can still see the red clay smeared on my knees, my face, my hands, walking back to the house holding that tiny, precious bottle. And for that brief moment, I knew — completely and without question — that I truly had it all.

I’ve been searching my whole life for that feeling again, and I know it has been here the entire time.

It’s right here. Look down.

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Friends — thank YOU so much for being here, I’m so grateful for your presence and time… and for you simply being exactly who you are!

My mom was away from home at the time when I wrote this, but when she gets back from her travels, I’m going to see if she can look around my parent’s house to find out if my little glass bottle is still around so I can get a picture of the actual bottle that I found that day!

May your week be filled with ease, peace, joy and love — all of which live inside you, at all times, even in the moments when you might not notice they are there.