I was so astonished that I started to cry. I realized then that if this was to be the only contact we had with the dolphins all week, I would still be extraordinarily happy. To me, they had decided to keep our date. Later, at the end of our swim, I spoke briefly with an old Hawaiian man who sat watching our foray out into the water. He grinned and quietly commented, "They haven't been here for weeks, but today they are here."

We did find a huge pod of dolphins -- or perhaps they found us. They showed up on each of the three days we had hoped to swim with them. It was magical and extraordinarily dreamlike -- like being in an altered state of reality or another dimension. In the evening Jon led us in meditations. "Visualize," he said. "What more do you want to create for yourself with the dolphins?" My inner vision had been flooded with brilliantly colored pictures of the dolphins ever since our first swim in the water. It was like watching my own inner nonstop movie. I wondered -- was I creating the pictures, or were the dolphins sending them to me? As I sat quietly attending to the in and out of my breath, I saw myself gazing into the eye of a dolphin as it slowly swam next to me. Then another one leapt high up in front of me. The next morning I found myself transfixed by the gaze of a dolphin as he gracefully swam past me. Then a loud splash caught my attention as a dolphin leapt into the air, spraying me with water. I laughed out loud. They must have gotten my message. Or maybe I got theirs.

One of the things we discovered was that the dolphins liked playing a game with leaves. They particularly seemed to like the large yellow leaves that floated out from shore. The dolphins would pass them from one fin to another, sometimes catching them on their flukes (tails) or carrying them on their rostrums (their long beaklike jaws). As a group we decided that we would come down to the bay for a fourth day and bring the dolphins a gift of leaves and flowers. That last morning we carefully swam out with our gifts, looking for the dolphins, but they had disappeared. We had not had a prior agreement to swim with them, and in their enigmatic fashion they had quietly vanished. We returned to the beach, and on the sand we created a farewell mandala of shells, red hibiscus flower petals and yellow leaves. I was touched by the delicate beauty of our fragile creation. It seemed appropriate that our last encounter would be with our group together standing in a circle holding hands, with the temporal beauty of nature spread out at our feet.

The teaching for me here was about the power of the heart, of letting go and surrendering. What I learned was that we are enormously powerful if we choose to create out of love. I felt as though I understood in a new way the old adage: Let go, and love will find you. With the distance of hindsight, my mind would sometimes argue that I tend to have a very overactive imagination and that I am a prime candidate for hearing and seeing things. How would I ever know whether the dolphins would have shown up regardless of anything I did or felt? Wasn’t it all just a matter of random chance? Over the years, however, the truth of these experiences has become more and more palpable. The dolphins are a constant reminder to check in with myself and to ask whether a wish for something or someone is truly coming from my heart. If the answer is yes, then those things -- be they people, projects, places, experiences -- seem to come towards me. They do show up. It is not a logical road. If my desire is coming from a place of ego or of trying to control a situation, the outcome is less predictable. The "message" doesn't seem to get through -- or if it does, it doesn't seem to have much power. Over and over again, I have heard the communications to relax and surrender and let go. As a result, I find that I cry more, and I laugh more. I try to let myself be in the river of life, no matter how scary it may sometimes appear -- to go with the flow rather than trying to resist it. I try following my intuition or my gut, often down a seemingly illogical path. Ultimately, the power of Love seems to find a way. It appears to be irresistable.