Patience is not my default setting. Yet everything seems to be conspiring to force me to practice patience (which means bouts of raving impatience followed by the exhaustion of temporary and grudging surrender.) I don't believe there is some script I am following, so much as life offers me the opportunity to create meaning out of otherwise random and indifferent occurrences. I am in charge of choosing which pieces I will use for this jigsaw puzzle. Case-in-point, observing a baby grackle bird being fed by its mother reminded me I too must remember to receive nourishment and more importantly relax my hustle to bring it to me. Beautiful message, right?
Well, a day or two later, Cowgirl came to tell me a baby grackle was caught in a bush. Or it was hanging dead in a bush, she was a little uncertain and I immediately told her to leave it alone. My experience has been when I rush in to "help" I often bring about the very outcome I am hoping to avoid. Now, it did pass through my mind "What the hell message is that about trust and support?" But quickly I let it drop. I mean, it may not be the same baby bird (but probably is) and it might not be dead but temporary stuck. Which is fitting for how I have felt these past few months (stuck, not hanging dead although the image of the hanged man in the tarot deck has been with me a lot lately.)
So I let all notions of ill-omens drop and continued through my day. The next day I went out and looked for signs of the baby bird and except for a little poo, there was nothing there. So either he was stuck, but freed himself (the version of the story I'm going with) or an animal in the night cleaned up the crime scene which has a poetic message of the circularity of life in there somewhere.
Where am I going with all of this? Honestly, I'm not sure why this story bubbled up today. I admit being in a space where there is much on my mind, but lacking the words or the desire or need to excavate any meaning. Which is perhaps the point: sometimes there is no message, no meaning. Sometimes you have a leaky dishwasher that floods under the cabinets and floors and you don't realize this until the mold starts to grow and then you discover a mighty black mold situation on your hands (and in your kitchen) and now you dance around a giant hepa-filter fan that blasts the pictures off of the walls never mind the sound and the floors get ripped up and the cabinets emptied and no dishwasher so drying dishes stacked over the remaining counter top space that isn't cluttered by the contents of the cabinets now homeless and it is such a giant mess that forces you to either descend into full depression or laugh your ass off at the way life is stranger than fiction and no one could write this without it sounding hokey but it is all true and it IS my life. Right now.
So I give up and relax into this cluttered flow. I stop trying to make sense of my life right now and instead decide to start living it again. Baking pies (in disaster kitchen no less)
and sewing Owl pillows (because owls started the whole chain of events in my reconstructed history)
and joining Cowgirl at the neighborhood pool (oh yes, school got out a week ago? Isn't that crazy?)
and I even accepted that our kitchen will probably stay this way until sometime in August as that is the earliest date a contractor can fit us in.
Accept. Surrender. Relax into what is ...
And then marvel when out of the blue (honest truth) a contractor stops at our house because he was the one who had installed all the wood molding and shelving and he always liked our house and thought of it as unique and now is looking to build his own home and was wondering who did the design or if we designed it ourselves and hey,he saw us home and he had a moment to stop ...
And now he may be the one to help us repair our kitchen and we are to contact him in week and he even sees a way to repair the cabinets without having to rip everything out. So we have a contractor and he has our spare set of home plans.
Circularity of life ...
Trusting and waiting for whatever is forming out there to make its way here while I abide in my own slow simmering so I am ready to meet it. Which is to say, meet Life.
Meanwhile ... I keep my eyes, ears, and heart open for the next piece I wish to add to this puzzle of mine.
