Sometimes a Cold is Just a Cold

Now and then my process painting teacher used to say to us sometimes a cold is just a cold. We were a group of women who loved to find symbolism and/or meaning in everything, which she was into also~especially when it came to things that showed up unexpectedly in our paintings~but she also liked to point out that sometimes, every now and then, something might actually mean nothing, i.e., sometimes a cold is just a cold.

In the past couple of weeks, I've had three close encounters with some sort of wader bird most likely either a heron or a great egret, both belonging to the same bird family. Now in the world of everything has meaning, when something in nature shows up three times in a relatively short period of time, it is very deserving of close attention. My first encounter was a gorgeous pair of large white wader birds that took off and flew low directly over my windshield startling me with their sudden appearance, their grace, and beauty. The next was a few days later when I rounded a curve on a small country road I take to avoid traffic and there, quite unexpectedly was a tall, elegant white wader bird standing all alone on the side of the road. The third one happened a few days ago when I was out for my early morning walk, taking pictures of the beautiful clouds and suddenly this one flew into the frame. It's not that seeing these birds is unusual. I'm accustomed to seeing herons and/or egrets often when I walk by a creek nearby. But these were unusual and unexpected sightings and so that morning I went home and looked up heron/egret medicine and found welcome words like calm, grace, solitude, patience, independence, resourcefulness, self-determination, and self-reliance. 

As I've mentioned before, I'm in the middle of a five week online course about writing your heart's desires into manifestation. Too late I found out that the writing part is journaling. (Hello... What did I think it was going to be?!) And more specifically, a lot, but not all of the writing is morning pages. My dislike of journaling is surpassed only by my disdain for morning pages (so named by creativity maven Julia Cameron, morning pages are three large notebook pages handwritten~a big fat brain dump~first thing every morning).

Unlike my oldest daughter who has compulsively journaled since she was ten years old (I feel sad today... my little ten-year old would write, unbeknownst to me until recently when she came across some old journals and shared with me, oh my aching heart), I've only sustained journaling for one period of my life, the first few years of my first therapy when scribbling all that had been locked up inside for so long felt like the only thing that kept me sane. Since then I've tried countless times to sustain some sort of journaling practice only to fail time and time again.

From Cameron's "morning pages" to Natalie Goldberg's "first thoughts," to Kim Klassen, my current course facilitator's insistence that journaling is what has made the difference in her own dreams manifesting, to my daughter practically yelling at me to just go journal for god's sake, there is insistence out there that stream of consciousness writing is not just a great thing, but the only thing, The one thing that will help you with basically anything you need help with. Everywhere I turn, it's the dogmatic end-all-be-all, it's the bees knees, it's the thing you simply must do no matter what.

So I tried again. Picked one of many mostly empty notebooks from my shelf, opened it, and wrote. Once. It was like pulling teeth.

Then, the day before the third bird sighting, I had a relatively big epiphany: What if it's just not for everyone? What if because it works so well for some people, they mistakenly assume it's the right thing for everyone but it's not? For many this might seem like a no-brainer, but I've become aware lately of how heavily influenced I am by certain people in certain circumstances claiming to know the truth. But what if, I mean really, what if it's just not for me? And, not just that, but I won't come to any irrevocable harm by not making it a part of my daily rituals; and also, my dreams can still come true!

Self-determination. Self-reliance. Thank you, herons/egrets.

Early yesterday morning I was trying to replace a broken glass drawer pull when the power screw driver caused one side of it to spin around forcefully and dig into two of my fingers. Three hours later I left urgent care with three stitches and a big bandage on the index finger of my left hand, my dominant hand, and a second cut on my middle finger that is bandaged but did not need stitches. Now writing by hand (and mostly by computer but I can wing it enough on the computer) isn't even an option, and won't be for another ten days to two weeks, basically the rest of the course.

I can't help but wonder... is it a sign or, is it just an ironically well-timed cut and some stitches?