The Right Car: A Hitchhiker's Hymn to the Divine in Humanity

By Josephine Swan

At age 52, Josephine finds herself carless and penniless, hitchhiking home from Montana to Maine, waiting for The Right Car to take her forward. This worldly journey with its hardships and happenstances becomes a spiritual journey—a wild test of faith and surrender and a testament to the best in humanity. Having left her island home in Maine where an oppressive New England family dynamic resisted mediation, Josephine heads West for fresh air only to be turned back as soon as she arrives.
“The Right Car” becomes her talisman, angel, and prescription for life as she stands along the back roads and Interstate on-ramps across America: “The Right Car” will arrive, the perfect help and directive, at the perfectly right time. In fact, and in such a way, all the teachings of her East Indian Siddha master, the same as in Eat, Love, Pray, are put to the test; lessons of surrender, patience, non-doership, witness consciousness, doubtless faith, and love.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Josephine Swan
• Release date: Jun 18, 2013
• ISBN: 9780989517126

Josephine Swan

Having worn every kind of hat and lived in many different environments, Josephine met her guru in 1985 and began a more spiritually centered life work. This work has taken place in small cabins with no electricity or running water (three of which she built herself) in Maine, Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, San Juan Island, and on two farms, and during a three-year stint on commercial fishing vessels in the Bering Sea. She also invested long periods of time at an ashram in the fire of spiritual purification. She now lives in solitude on an island off the coast of Maine, chopping ice and carrying wood, in a land where winter is longer than summer.

Book preview

THE RIGHT CAR

A Hitchhiker's Hymn to the Divine in Humanity

By Josephine Waitstill Swan

Copyright 2013 Josephine Waitstill Swan

Smashwords Edition

Smashwords Edition License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Also available in paperback

Dedication and Notes

I dedicate this book, with all my heart, to all my drivers.

All names of persons in this book have been changed.

I do not recommend hitchhiking at any time. This was a very specific destiny.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Coming Soon… The Right Driver

About the Author

Acknowledgements

Thank you to the following people for their assistance:

Gay Martin, [e-mail] for editing

Madeleine Vite; for photos, madphoto.com

Patricia Cluche bookcover and logo, [e-mail]

Lynn Hegney graphic art, [e-mail]

and the Rangeley, Maine Library.

Chapter 1

The first quiver of panic passed through when the woman in the peasant dress and beads standing in the lobby of the Boulder, Montana, Hot Springs Hotel smiled sweetly and cooed the bad omen, Oh, I'm so sorry, the owners don't allow tents on the property.

I had just traveled five and a half days through midsummer swelter, asphyxiated, I suspect, on the fumes from the gorgeous 1994 dark-blue Volvo sedan 850 named Pinstripe (due to its likeness to a fine tailored suit), which I had been Divinely privy to purchase for a singing $800, cash down exact, exchanged for the keys and registration in a tiny diner in backwoods Maine.

The car had been quietly waiting for me hidden but not covered in a shed attached to a huge old barn across the road from an Appalachian Trail bunkhouse in which I, too, had been quietly waiting. We met, the car and I, when I ambled across the road to check out the barn.

There was no way to avoid its obvious suggestion; just there in perfect shape, backed in, ready to drive out, something powerful emanating from its ominous bulk and glitz; sleek nose, leather seats, five-speed, good big tires, huge width, the clean dark midnight-blue finish, and the unmistakable realization that this car was a highway car. A fast one. The ultimate highway car perhaps.

Immediately, I missed the big Dodge pickup truck I had been forced to sell the winter before, miserably regressed to the old standby, hitchhiking. And then I missed the farm I had also been forced to sell which was an association with the pickup. I didn't want a Volvo. I didn't want a highway car.

But what is left when the Great Spirit weighs in with one storm after another, lifting off what destiny has completed? What is left is raw surrender. One day it will not feel raw; the rip of loss and deep grief. One day it will feel like the song and dance of joyfully recognized Divine Grace, Divine Order knocking out clinging karmas.

Surrendered or not, I have to at least admit I know this game. I have been at it for twenty-five years under the tutelage of a meditation Master, and the fire of that relationship has burned me and my ego relentlessly, but alas, lovingly. There is always a glass of cold water, I have noticed, offered in the heat of the annihilation of the limited individual identity, the one that says I am this in the drama of the Guru-disciple relationship. In one short paragraph, the great Concise Yoga Vasistha says it all:

When one turns away from the notions of 'I' and 'the world' one is liberated. The notion of 'I am this' is the sole bondage. [The Concise Yoga Vasistha by Swami Venkatesananda, State University of New York Press, Albany, copyright 1983, State University of New York.]

Yeah, well, so I bought the car. Because my teachers, the Great Beings of India and their scriptures, know that to get free of this bondage we must just keep going and be in the world. That the world is the schoolroom. Surrender was, at present, my course load, and this car was calling me to class. The glass of cold water was that there was nothing wrong with it except a lack of power steering (no easy way out for the seeker), which some Volvo mechanic listed in the Yellow Pages said didn't matter. Just drive it!

The Divine go-ahead. I started west.

* * * *

Chapter 2

The denial of a safe place to spend the first night at the Montana destination felt like a cold hell. I stared dumbly for a moment and then feigned easeful acceptance, but not without genially offering the fact that I had come all the way from Maine and had been a paying customer over the years, and wasn't the Boulder Hot Springs advertised as a place of healing, and perhaps they would like to look me up on their computer system to remember who I was?

On dead legs, I rigidly navigated the hallway and got back into my car in the blur of a sudden fear. The offer of a free twenty-minute dip in the hot springs had not soothed my terrorized soul. We're about to close, but if you can keep it to a few minutes, go ahead.

No tent space on their many acres of sage-land.

No place to spend the first night.

Rush the supposed healing soak.

You are not welcome.

I had traveled the dusty trail to the wild West frequently over the past thirty years in all manner of covered wagon: planes, trains, Saabs, a little red Omni, several little pickups, a pop-up camper, rented new cars from airports; sleeping in tents, motels, the backs of the trucks with perhaps the same longing as all my fellow ugly ducklings; waiting, searching, for something inside to smile and nod and say, Yes, here you belong, you are home now, you can finally roll out the landing gear.

To be unwelcome upon arrival after a grueling journey—in fact, two years of grueling journey—was a trip-switch that re-stimulated the pain of a lifetime of violent judgment. The road for the ugly duckling is a road fraught with threat of death; emotional, spiritual, mental, psychological, and thus, in turn, physical. It is beyond a miracle that I am still amongst the living. I mean, how does the tender soul outlive the statement, that you don't belong in this family and should find another one? Or the accusation that you are evil? And, receiving no support from a soul-destroying patriarchy, this type of lynching happens over and over again.

The first mediated family meeting was my doing, and, in a karmic sense, my undoing. Like calling on my own executioners. My meditation Master had said once—preside over your own sacrificial fire. In the Bagavad Gita, the ancient renowned East Indian scripture, the saint Krishna shoves disciple Arjuna into a battle in which he is asked to kill off all his greater family, who pose as the enemy. Arjuna, an undefeated, unequalled godlike warrior crumples at Krishna's feet struck down with grief at the Divine command. The only way Arjuna survived his dharma, or right action—which was, in fact, to fight—was with Krishna's wisdom handed down throughout the battle.

The slayer and the slain are the same, teaches Krishna. God is everything playing all roles. The mind alone distorts this Truth, throwing up the illusory dividing line of duality. Unlike most of us out here, Krishna blessed Arjuna with the actual state of that Divine detachment. Much easier, yes?

Things had come to a head out on the family island when I went out and discovered sacred trees that I had pleaded be spared had instead been tossed in hunks among the sweet bayberry bushes. No one had told me the execution had taken place. My youth and innocence had assumed that my uplifted voice had been heard by the collective; the parents and siblings. In fact, there was no collective mentality associated with this family at all.

I had stood on a nearby rock looking out to sea and I scared myself; a literal howl of blood-curdling grief cried out from somewhere foreign inside me. It was like hearing the sound of one's own murder.

Immediately following, I blindly wandered up to the porch of my cabin and sat for meditation. A vision arose, complete with even the detail of what food to serve, and I called the meeting. The dynamics at play within this family manifested immediately with the slam of an ice storm so intense it nearly killed all of us trying to get there, particularly the two heavyweight therapists flying in from Washington state, one mine, a brilliant middle-aged woman, and the other the appropriate man's man, my therapist named him, to deal with the good-old-boy New England patriarchic systems and personality traits.

For two whole days we sat in the high-ceilinged parlor of the old inn I had chosen as neutral space in a country town in Maine, while I was blamed, shamed, and judged mentally ill. Both therapists worked hard to get the family onto their own roles in the multigenerational dynamics, but, unbelievably, they failed at this. A haunting energy pervaded. The wind actually howled in the cold, empty stone fireplace. All the women present did not sleep, the men slept soundly. It was too real, the actual soul-murdering of the sacrificial lamb.

I