Last week my wife and I were in Mallorca for 6 days, an island in the Mediterranean. It was our first visit. When thinking back, some subtle symbolisms came to my mind.
An island has something to do with the illusion of separate existence, feeling cut off from the rest of the world but nevertheless related to it. We came by plane, and there were plenty of planes landing – like thoughts about a greater world coming from out of vast space into the garden of our small mind.
After landing we took an “earth vehicle”, a small car for the time of our stay. Don’t we land in such small cars when we take birth? And don’t we need to keep the inner link to the greater soul not to get lost? Our navigation device was this link to the greater world via satellite and it helped us to orient in the new environment.
We had a small apartment directly at the port where the big cruise liners stop for a day or two. There was a beautiful sight over the harbour, the city and the surrounding mountains. The cruise ships appeared and disappeared in front of the house – and with them the groups of traveling souls. A closer look showed that on the ships there were lots of tiny cells with a table and 2, 3 chairs on the balcony – isn’t that island consciousness, even on a moving boat?
Walking along the yacht harbor with all the many empty ships already in hibernation, I thought, how much money and material lies waiting there in the water for short times of satisfying the dreams of their owners… Issa, our friend from Mallorca, later told us that the ships are often just used for 1-2 weeks a year. Some owners seemed to awaken from their dreams – there were several ships with “for sale” signs, “bargain price”.
The first day we set out for a tour to the very north of the island – Port de Pollença, Cap de Formentor. On the way, we decided to leave the main road and take a mountain pass via Lluc – a good decision. In many serpentines the small road climbed through rough rocky sceneries. The roads were full of sweating bicycle drivers pedalling uphill, alone or in small groups, enjoying the pain of reaching to their limits – some kind of a modern Hatha Yoga practice.
We were “car hikers”, and not the only ones, doubling these biking folks whenever there was a short straight route. We had a noon stop in Port Pollença and enjoyed observing the other tourists walking like us along the waterside promenade. And there were also tired bikers with their colourful hightech clothes resting in the grass and talking to their iPhones. An Indian restaurant convinced us most, and the food was delicious – two more times an Indian restaurant was the best place for us vegetarians.
In the afternoon we made a short excursion to the nice small port of Cala Sant Vicenç and then continued towards Cap de Formentor. The road offered fantastic sights down steep cliffs into the vastness of the sea. Perceiving the border between land, sea and space was like getting out of one’s dense material identity and opening up to the vast spheres of the greater space.
The more we approached “land’s end” of the peninsula, the more we felt the two sides of the sea approaching and thinning down the rocky ground until at the end there was just sea and sky. It was like reaching the Sahasrara, the head centre, where we can touch the realms of higher consciousness. And like the Ajna centre, the “point of light” in our head, the lighthouse elevated its top towards the sky with a gorgeous view over the bay.
Next day, we change the direction – from the Ajna center to the Muladhara, the base center at the “end of the spine”. We visited the Cuevas del Drach, the Dragon Caves near Porto Cristo on the west coast of the island. The limestone caves consist of a series of halls with a dream-world of stalactites and stalagmites and several small lakes. The biggest of them has a length of about 115 metres. The imagination of nature have created forms out of stone like forests, vertebral columns or Shiva lingams. In the last big hall there was a huge amphitheater where we listened – together with our batch of over 200 other visitors – to some live classical music played on little illumined boats. Afterwards one of the boats brought us to the exit of the cave.
The third day our friend Issa took us to the old town of Palma, the capital. In a nice vegan restaurant we met Sylvia. Then we had a walk through some old lanes of the city. From the cathedral there was a beautiful view over the harbor. The position of the city, the big water fountain in front of the cathedral and a nearby artwork made me think of the throat centre, the link between the inner and the outer world, the center of communication and interaction.Don’t these palm trees remind of vertebral columns with a head center at the top? In a courtyard we felt the energy of a 2000 years old olive tree, withdrawn within itself, a silent witness of bygone ages.
Reflection selfie in a shop window with planets
Mysterious sphinx
Olive tree dreaming of 2000 years
Arab garden
The fountain – like the upsurge of the kundalini energy
Artwork – up the spinal column towards the light in the head centre
The 4th day it was raining. My wife wanted to see one of the vulgar places of mass tourism, parties and binge drinking – so to say the “other side” of Mallorca. Our friend recommended two places and we went to Magaluf. (Wikipedia: “British tour operators have warned the Spanish Tourist Board that the image of Magaluf is affecting their efforts to market Mallorca. The night-life has been notorious for many years, and the latest image is not much to be desired with news reports of balcony deaths.) Now, the city was nearly empty with many hotels closed. The Hotel Sol Katmandu has a distasteful adventure park consisting of a ghost climbing park, a church-like house with a demon on the roof, a Nepalese bottom-up temple as a haunted house (what to say of the earthquake victims in real Kathmandu?) with a cemetery at the entrance and a yeti climbing up the window front of the hotel… We soon left the place and enjoyed lunch in nearby Santa Ponsa.
In the afternoon of the 5th day we went with Issa to Valldemossa, a place of outstanding beauty in the Western mountains which has attracted artists and many other prominent guests. And of course streams of tourists. There were not many at the moment. We strolled through the lanes and admired the old houses. Outside one of the churches, in front of a statue of the patron saint of Mallorca, Catalina Thomas, we sat down for evening meditation – a charming place with a sublime atmosphere. Nearly all houses had little ceramic plates at the entrances depicting St. Catalina and a sentence asking the saint to pray for them – why don’t they pray themselves?
Statue of St. Catalina – our place of meditation
Friday the time of our stay in Mallorca was already over. At noon time we arrived at the airport. Two hours later we were back in the air. Soon the island disappeared in the clouds leaving just little holes – there was again the road we had taken three days ago, and there the coast town we had visited. Two hours later the plane flew a circle over Berne and descended to the little airport from where we had departed a few days before.
Over the Alps
