The Island
Want to realize your power?
After college, I was in New York, working as a cocktail waitress and trying to be an actress. The grind was somehow both deadening and painful. I didn’t know how to make a life. If you’d have told me the answer was to join a plant medicine cult in Maui and fall in love with myself, I’d have told you, “No, it’s to get an agent.” But that’s what happened.
My dad invited me and my brother to Maui. “Be careful, Lucia," he said, “You're going to fall in love with the island.” Maui was rumored to lure good capitalist children off course.
I got the appeal. Sitting on a lush green hilltop overlooking crashing waves, I looked at my two new road buddies from our hostel. “Are you actually this happy?” I asked. They looked at me without answering. I was speaking their language, but in another world.
Maui was seducing me. Sleeping, I dreamed of the forest. Awake, the world was alive. "This is just what vacation feels like,” I reasoned. But the thought of this world ending with a plane ride back to a late-night shift felt like doom.
I couldn't board the plane. I walked in and out of security over and over. It was my best Sarah Lawrence performance art piece to date: Identity Crisis at a Security Checkpoint.
Going back to New York meant pursuing being an actress—the only thing I thought I ever wanted. Staying in Maui meant following a call I didn’t understand.
My dad said, "Stay.” My brother said, "You’ve got nothing going on in New York.” They left for the gate. I cried? It was torture. Finally, my mind quit. My body chose.
The airport had a nice green area where I made one phone call. “George?” I said, “Yes?” “I can’t make my shift tomorrow night. I’m in love… with an island.” I actually said that. “Ok, thanks for letting me know.” Thanks for understanding, George.
I hopped on an airport shuttle bus. No money, no direction. A boy my age in Birkenstocks got on. “Are you going to the hostel?” I asked like a lunatic. He wasn’t, but he proceeded to tell me about a farm he ran on the other side of the island. “The other side”’ was the really beautiful place for the really wild-eyed. “Want to come live there?” “Yes,” I said.
He had some errands to run, then picked me up in a pickup truck a few hours later, blasting guttural chants in a foreign language. We rode for hours, barely talking. ”Do you have any questions?” he asked. Yes. Who am I? What do I want? “No,” I said.
That night, I was welcomed with a feast from things grown on the land. I met the matriarch, let’s call her Wendy. And the crew of twenty something year-old guys, let's call them the lost boys. And of course, Peter, mid-forties going on eighteen, who sang songs on his guitar after dinner.
“Ayahuasca, ayahuasca, ayahuasca, santo spirito,“ he sang. Then he turned to me, “Do you know what ayahuasca is?” I didn’t. “This is our church, we drink ayahuasca every full moon, and she teaches us these songs. When we play them with her, they sound even better.” I’m in a church with people who talk to plants and think these songs are good. I didn't sleep.
Despite being a born-and-bred liberal elite snark monster, I was mesmerized. How could I not be? I was in an otherworldly place with beautiful aliens. Wendy taught me the rules of "conscious communication," even while demonstrating that she was the exception to them, in a Gwyneth Paltrow meets doomsday-cult leader way. Peter taught me all the benefits of the coconut. They’re myriad. I contributed what I could to farm life—pulling weeds.
I made one phone call home. “Mom, I’m realizing I don’t need to be a great actress—or a great anything—I can just be a person.” “Come home,” she said, “Your peers are suffering here.” We were speaking the same language in different worlds.
One day, while nude sunbathing with girls who looked like yoga mermaids, drinking fresh coconuts on a rock in the ocean, one of them mentioned the “Illuminati.” “What's the Illuminati?” I asked. They became exhausted. “You tell her,” one girl told another. They proceeded to share a reality-shattering stream of intertwining conspiracies that had, in total, caused many of these young people to flee to a faraway recess in the middle of the Pacific. I drank up every sip.
The full moon ayahuasca ceremony approached. My mantra had been, “Don’t drink the Kool Aid.” Now, I was considering. These radiant people all praised the benefits. What I needed was to know what I wanted—Maui or the matrix. Ayahuasca might help me find out.
I decided to join the ceremony. My stated intention was “to realize my power.” What happened was, I fell in love with myself. I learned something I can never unknow, even as I forget it almost every day; Love comes from inside.
The next day, we watched a movie starring their neighbor, “The Messenger,” with Woody Harrelson. The soul-to-skin performances inspired me. I remembered my true desire to act— beneath and before the game of achievement. I wanted to go back to New York to realize my talent. I left the next day.
Yesterday, my friend Julie said, “Truth is power. Power is responsibility. Responsibility is love.” My intention for the ceremony was “to realize my power.” My path to getting there was being seduced by a trickster island, only for her to lure me into falling in love with myself, and in this, realize a transformational truth.
Loving myself became my greatest responsibility. This meant going to the place best suited to realize my gifts. This choice became my power. I would love myself in the matrix. Maybe that’s what waking up is after all.
If you want to realize your power, fall in love with yourself.
Re. the conspiracy soup, I eventually recalibrated to curious skepticism. I was forever humbled by realizing the fluidity of beliefs and how little any of us actually know. But that's another story.
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