Midnight’s injury and recovery was and continues to be a real challenge for me personally, but it’s also been a time of personal growth and discovery. I learned or revisited many life lessons during this time.

Remarkable on this journey were the continual signs and support from my Guides on the Coaching Staff, via dreams and synchronicities. Important as these were in each moment, it was impossible for me to retain the sense of them all for the entire time.

Perhaps that’s just as it needed to be: The little events that constituted these signs of support were enormously helpful (when recognized) in the moment; and even when forgotten in the daily-ness of it all, they were recorded in my journals. Now, when things have settled down and Midnight is out of immediate danger, I can go back and examine them.

In this and later entries, I’ll share my experiences and interpretations with you. As always, comments are welcome.

This first post draws mainly from a journal entry made about two weeks after Midnight’s initial injury:

“10 November. I had such a hard time sleeping last night, kept awake by jabs and twangs of pain, the hiccups, general restlessness. All of it seemed to mirror my jagged, mindless losing or misplacing of practically everything—car keys, sunglasses, hat, Midnight’s spoon, boot, and so on.

“It’s hard for me to articulate just what it is that’s causing the huge disruption in my life. It’s not Midnight’s dangerous physical situation—not that in and of itself, though it would be easy to mistake my tension for simple worry, especially since I’m his primary caregiver.

“It’s not that, exactly, but something simpler and more elemental. I think it’s my (understandable, human) inability to just allow things to be the way they need to be. ‘Not my will, but Thine, O Lord.’ I got to that place the Saturday night after Midnight’s injury, but it didn’t last. That state of grace evaporated, unnoticed, as soon as the decision was made to give him a chance.”

A couple of weeks into Midnight’s healing process, it had become obvious that, while he was out of immediate danger from the break itself, he was in greater and increasing danger from the complications of the injury: pressure sores, primarily, and the pain and possibility of infection associated with them.

It felt to me that I was the one ultimately responsible for his condition—as though whether he lived or died rested upon my shoulders. No matter that it was obviously untrue—even I realized that. There was a part of my brain that still said that it was my responsibility.

Gone was the peace that had greeted me that first Saturday night, when I truly “gave it up to God.” And I couldn’t seem to get back to that state of being:

“I’m still pretty much in that restless place, searching for that peace, that deep sense of allowing, of giving things over to God’s Will, that belongs to the state of grace that I’m describing. I can speak the words: ‘Not my will, but Thine, O Lord,’ but they’re hollow, devoid of substance. No matter how many times I repeat them, I don’t believe them, I don’t feel their power.

“What is missing is submission…. No, even that word is wrong, because it’s coming from the dominance paradigm, which is, to me, utterly discredited. Not submission, then, but a kind of joining, a kind of acknowledgement of the One-ness of all of us. It’s so hard to describe—another of those things that you’ll never understand until you’ve actually gotten ‘there,’ even if only once and only briefly.

“Aunt Doe [my father’s younger sister, who passed on a couple of years ago] has been close in my awareness since yesterday morning, and I could almost hear her as she comforted me. I asked her how she managed to do what she did—she was caregiver to ill and dying friends and family for most of her adult life. ‘Prayer’ was the immediate response. I never knew that about her…but now it feels so obvious, and so right. And I sense that for her, too, it was never easy. No one except a saint lives in that state of acceptance all the time—and probably not saints, either. Part of the human condition is the struggle….

“It’s interesting that just these last weeks I’ve given up fighting against the ‘old ways’ of addressing the Divine, and begun to understand 1) that it makes no difference the name we give It, and 2) the awesome power of those time-honored prayers that I learned as a child. The 23rd Psalm, for instance, and the Lord’s Prayer.

“I’m beginning to sound like a religious person—that seems so foreign to me, but it’s not.

“I seek again to experience the joy and peace of Acceptance….”

(You can read more about Midnight’s injury and recovery in the blog over at The Alchemical Horse.)

The first time I met an angel on the MetroLink was about five years ago, early in the spring. A woman about my own age boarded the train a couple of stops before the end of the line, where my car was parked. I had earplugs in to shut out the noise, and was lost in my own thoughts, staring out the window.

She sat down on the seat in front of me. I noticed she was African American, dressed in slacks and a hoodie and carrying a purse and a black shopping bag. She sat for a minute, then reached around and tapped me on the shoulder to get my attention, pointed to my earplugs, and then signaled (can’t remember exactly how) that she wanted to talk to me. She pulled out a dog-eared piece of paper with a number of sentences written in ragged but legible block capitals. It went something like:

I have been in St. Louis only a short time.

I don’t speak—I am deaf but I can read lips.

I am diabetic.

I am a woman who loves God very much.

I have run out of food and would appreciate any donation so that I can buy some.

Any amount would be welcome.

God bless you.

Something like that. I haven’t done her justice at all, but I was reading very fast and was kind of dumbstruck. Anyway, I just opened my wallet, took the cash that was in it—two $5 bills —and handed them to her. She looked at them for a long moment, eyes shut, then kissed the bills and smiled at me. In my head I was saying to her, “Of course! Whatever I have,” thinking that she could at least buy a chicken, some beans, and some vegetables for $10; I wished I had had more.

After a minute she pulled another dog-eared envelope out of her purse and started showing me photographs of various young people—pointing to them, then to herself—I believe these were her children. A photo of one of them graduating from college, it looked like; a group of several family members, one of whom could have been this woman herself in happier times; a photo of a young man and his wife and their toddler—I understood that this was her son.

Many of these were recent photos—within a few years, I’d say. I leaned forward to look at them with her, pointed to some. Then she pulled out a photocopied page, also well-worn, that read (the part that I could see quickly) “In memory of” and then a photo of an elderly woman. The name was on the part of the page that was folded under. “Your Mom?” I asked as she looked at me, and she nodded. Then she kissed the photo and put it back into the envelope with the photos.

I had my hand on her shoulder the whole time. I’m not sure, now, how that happened. It was odd, but I felt some kind of kinship, wanting to lend her whatever bit of strength and encouragement I could.

What I remember feeling wasn’t pity of any kind, and I had no sense of difference or superiority. There was just this kinship, something fundamental that we shared that somehow overruled all the judgements and warnings that my mind would have offered, had it been asked. And she seemed strong and sober and capable—I just wondered what life events had brought her to this place.

As the train stopped she looked me in the eyes and smiled, then reached back to shake my hand. Without thinking I took off my glove before grasping her hand. As we left the train she reached back and grabbed my hand again and I gave hers a squeeze. Then we walked off in opposite directions. I didn’t look back.

I was in tears by the time I got to the stairs, not for her, but because it was such a profound experience. In that moment, I asked God to look after her, to see her through to better times.

Somehow—and this is the odd part—I felt like I had been blessed by this encounter. It almost felt like a … “reward” isn’t the right word … a blessing, like an affirmation of something, maybe an assurance that I can make a difference to someone, and they can make a difference to me, in a fraction of a moment’s time. One of those weird flashes of something of the Divine that you just can’t explain at all but that leave you feeling like you’ve glimpsed the Infinite in someone else’s eyes.

It felt like she was an angel, somehow; and I wonder, now, if I was some kind of angel for her, too. I’m left feeling so grateful for the encounter….

The other evening I took the train home from downtown after a pleasant evening spent with my brother and some of his family. I love the train, and will use any excuse to ride. It’s hard to say exactly why, other than the fact that my dad worked for the Illinois Central Railroad when I was very young, and riding any train reminds me a bit of those times.

Another reason I love MetroLink is one I don’t generally share: I’ve met angels riding the train. No, seriously. Angels.

Angels come in many shapes and sizes, of course, and the ones I’m talking about have a human form. Like the other night: A nondescript fellow of indeterminate age got on downtown someplace, carrying a bunch of plastic bags filled with who-knows-what; I didn’t pay much attention to him at first. He declined a seat, and instead stood near the door, facing front, about ten feet ahead of me.

It soon became apparent that this guy was far from sober. He had trouble standing up when the train jerked from side to side, and it took him a while to find a place to hang on. Then, holding onto the rail with one hand, he began to dance with his reflection in the Plexiglas panel in front of him. Only then did I notice his earbuds and the small recorder he was carrying.

Three sheets to the wind he was, no doubt. But oh my, that guy can dance! His moves were fluid, energetic, gracefully masculine, and very creative. You had to smile, watching him—he was lost in his music, just following it with his body, eyes half closed, never making a sound. Once in a while he’d look at his reflection for a few seconds and smile at it, dancing with it.

A few stops later, a striking young woman walked forward as the train approached her stop. She stood near the door opposite him, ignoring his gyrations.

The fellow saw her, though, and danced across the aisle toward her. His movements grew more intense, more erotic, though never really suggestive, and he said not a word. She glanced at him, looked away, and grinned to herself and the rest of us as she got off the train when the doors opened. The dancer went back to “his” side of the aisle and his reflection.

By now, many of us were smiling, some were laughing openly. The dancer never noticed any of us. Finally, nearing his own stop, he picked up his plastic bags, put a cigarette between his lips, and located his lighter in the depths of his pocket. When the doors opened, he stepped off into the night.

As he left, I thought, “That guy was an angel!” Why? Because despite the vast differences in our age, income level, skin color, and practically everything else that you could name, I recognized a kindred spirit.

This man, this angel, is a dancer just like I am. The physical joy of melody and rhythm, of moving our bodies with music, of creating motions that reflect and embellish the music—these are joys that we share. And the sensuality of the music and the dance, that joyful eros of Dionysian madness, a drunkenness that doesn’t always require alcohol—that, he and I also share as surely as we share the air we breathe.

With the angel’s help, I was able to feel the kinship with this man, and by extension, with all humanity, in a way that wouldn’t have been possible had it been just a mental exercise. This gnosis occurred on a level that bypassed my rational brain and my conditioned responses to the perceived Other.

Thank you, sir, for bringing this understanding. May you dance in joy for the rest of your days!

[Note: This post is the fourth in a series. “Prelude: Pain” is here, “Frustration” is here, and “Invitation to Rethink” is here.]

Over the past few months, I’ve written (see the links at the top of the piece) about the pain in my tongue and jaw that’s been pretty much unrelenting for the past decade. So many times over those years I’ve tried to get a handle on it, from many different angles, and nothing has worked for very long. My doctor prescribed a medication that helped enormously, but alas, it stopped working some time in May.

The fact that the pain returned in spite of medication let me know in no uncertain terms that I need to come to grips with the underlying meaning in the pain. Only then will I be healed of this demon of mine.

Then there was the series of computer crashes and other electronic events that invited me to stop and think about how I spend each moment of my day. The chronic busy-ness that characterizes our lives these days is, for me at least, an absolute danger to my psychic wellbeing.

So I have tried my best to be aware of my mental state in each moment. I’ve cut down on my obligations and have put more emphasis on meditation and spiritual practice. In spite of my efforts, a few weeks ago the pain got so bad that eating was excruciating. Sleep could not come, because I was jolted awake each time I dozed off by the buzzing jolts of “electricity” in my tongue and jaw. There was no relief except during the hours I was working with the horses, or actively dancing.

It was these brief times of relief that gave me enough hope to keep going.

Then, on the way home from the Rescue Ranch one day at the end of June, I ran over a white dog. That strange story and its ramifications will be told more fully in an upcoming post, but you can imagine how horrifying it was! I couldn’t for the life of me figure out the meaning in that event.

Whatever its meaning, the accident with the dog seems to have had the effect of focusing my attention in a way that hadn’t happened before. Maybe it just made me feel a kind of “life and death” urgency. I don’t know.

I do know that somehow I became more open to Guidance. Messages began showing up in different ways: a phrase “dropped” into my head; a tarot reading that didn’t make sense at the time but did a few days later; a realization brought by the horses and finally understood.

And at the same time, the pain intensified. Eating became a painful necessity; nights were filled with pain. I was in real misery.

Then, on the Fourth of July, I “heard” a phrase, out of nowhere, unconnected to what was going on at the time:

“You can never be happy if nothing is ever ‘enough’; you can never be healed if you cannot accept healing.”

Hmmm….

That afternoon at the barn, working with a client and my horses, I thought about how lucky I am: I mean, how many people get a chance to be of service to others by doing something that makes them as happy as horses do me? That’s an amazing privilege.

“But…” (I always have a “but”)…. Always the questions: “Is this what I should be doing? I don’t deserve to be happy–I need to be serving others! I must be missing something! There has to be MORE!” Thing is, I need to FIRST rejoice in what I DO have, not refuse that gift because I think it should be MORE in some way. Yes?

And as far as the second part of that mysterious phrase goes, if I can’t accept the gifts that I have without wanting something more, then I’m not going to be able to accept anything, including healing.

AHA! Breakthrough!

By the next day, the pain had significantly lessened, and that trend continued. Four days later, I could completely forget about my jaw for hours at a time. Amazing! But why?! It felt almost like I just woke up one day and said, “Oh. It’s OK to be happy, so I’m happy now…” and instantly the pain started to subside.

VERY weird, but what if it really is that simple?

It would be easy to beat myself up for not figuring this out sooner, but I had to remind myself that I could not “figure it out” sooner—I was not ready. I couldn’t hear the message over the din of all those negative voices that have been playing in my head for 60+ years.

They’re still there, but somehow I can understand them for what they are: voices from the past, learned responses to life that no longer serve me. And apparently I’ve gained enough experience to be able to hear them and just let them go. That is amazing.

It’s also important that I never, ever gave up the belief that I could be healed of the pain. Never. Not even that last week or so, when it ramped up to where I couldn’t imagine how I would live with it the rest of my life.

So for almost a week, I was pain-free and happy—genuinely, legitimately happy, not about any one thing but about my life, my adventure on this plane of existence. Excited about what comes next, excited about what new learnings will present themselves once less of my vital energy is taken up by pain.

I knew that healing would take a while—no doubt about that—and that nerve will always be a weak spot, apt to flare up under stress. But I felt like the residual pain could now serve its legitimate function of an “early warning system” of tension, anger, frustration, or whatever unnecessary “negative” emotion threatened to take up residence in my psyche.

“…and she lived happily ever after.” Right? Um, no, not exactly….

In mid-July, out of the blue, I got a phone call to let me know that the program that I coordinate at the Rescue Ranch has been suspended, perhaps cancelled. Shock flooded me, and a whole host of emotions ranging from outrage and anger to grief and despair.

I couldn’t stay relaxed, and could not focus on happiness. Sure enough, the pain returned—full force. For these last couple of weeks, I’ve been in pain day and night—again.

But at least there is reason to hope. The key to the door of this cage exists. I just have to pick it up again.

I’ve had what seems like a record series of weird and unsettling events in the last few weeks. Here’s one of them:

I have been wearing contact lenses for 46 years—my first prescription was a gift from my parents for my 16th birthday. In all that time, I have never lost a lens, and have damaged only two or three. In all those years.

And for all those years, I’ve been using the little screw-top reservoirs to store my lenses. The routine is to take one lens out, put it in the well of the case, look carefully to make sure it’s really there in the liquid, then replace the cap. Repeat with the other lens. Forty-six years.

Last time I was at the eye doctor’s, I bought a set of disposable lenses—a four-pack of lenses for each eye. I am extremely careful with my lenses, so one pair lasts much longer than the average. As of a week ago, I was on my second pair, with two more pairs to go, even though it’s been more than a year. The ones I was wearing were getting a little gunky, so I had been thinking about changing to a new pair.

Last Wednesday afternoon, I took my lenses out and placed them carefully into the case. That evening, when I opened the case to put them back in, there was no lens in the right-hand compartment.

What?! I was surprised, to say the least. But I didn’t think much about it, just figured that I had somehow goofed up, once in all the years of being careful. No worries. I changed to a new, squeaky-clean pair as I had been planning to do anyway.

Thursday afternoon, after wearing them all day, I removed the new contacts and placed them carefully in the case for the night. Friday morning, when I went to put them in, there was once again no lens in the right-hand compartment.

After 46 years, losing one lens was understandable; but two lenses on consecutive days? Um, not so much….

I have noticed lately that the acuity in my eyes is decreasing pretty rapidly, and I have a number of new “floaters.” I’d been considering going to the eye doctor, but knowing my love of procrastination, I probably would have waited a few months.

When the second lens disappeared, I didn’t even bother to get upset. I just pitched the remaining one and put in the last set. I’ll go to see the eye doctor right away, even though that one pair would likely last me another several months. But I assume that my Guides think it’s advisable for me to go sooner rather than later, and who am I to argue?

I can always tell when I’m learning something that’s really important and difficult for my psychological growth: The exciting feel of sudden insight gets slippery and hard to hang on to. I “get” it, then forget it almost immediately. I try to drag pieces of it back into memory, but it slips away again.

I have a theory that this occurs whenever we get close to something important, something our ego is having a hard time with. When it happens, It fun to watch the understanding slide in and out of awareness.

Yesterday, I had my cell phone with me, thank goodness, during one of these events, so I could record my thoughts. The insight has to do relationships, which have so often been problematic in my life. The understanding itself is important to me, and hopefully to some of you reading this. But what I especially want to share here is the process. I wonder if others have similar experiences.

I recorded the first flash of understanding while I was getting ready to take a shower (Why is it that we do so much of our best thinking in the bathroom?), but by the time I actually got into the shower, I couldn’t for the life of me remember what it was. Frustrating!

The recording is fascinating: I started out excitedly talking about the background of the situation that led to the insight, but then, you can hear it fade away. “This is so hard to hold on to! It has to do with us all being connected through Source…. [long pause] …but I can’t remember what it was, exactly, or how it fit in.”

Half an hour later, I sat down beside my waterfall and turned on the recorder:

“It’s funny, when these insights show up: They’re so squirrelly. If I could sit down and really focus on them and get them down I feel like I could hold on to them. They’re evanescent. There are things in this life that you can see so clearly, but then when you reach for them and try to catch them, they slip away…. Or like when you’re watching a tiny wild animal that keeps flitting through the underbrush, but if you go to grab it, it’s gone. These really deep insights are like that, especially at first. You can feel them, see them out of the corner of your eye, but when you look straight at them and try to put words to them, they just vanish.

“Right now, I can’t even put my fingers on exactly what I wanted to say when I started this recording! But I guess it’s good, in a way, because that means they’re THERE; they’re just shy. They’re like that tiny animal—if you look too hard at them, if you use “hard eyes,” they disappear. But if you just let them be, let them grow, you’ll get to see them eventually. That’s enormously frustrating for this time-bound ego of mine!

“I want so badly to get this essential wisdom down in some form, and it slips away. It’s exactly like trying to catch a dream when you wake up…. Maybe it’s the same process. Or it’s like trying to SEE in the imaginal world, which I can’t do well—I can’t see with my “hard eyes” in the Imaginal. Sometimes I can see with soft eyes. Sometimes I can’t see at all, but I can perceive with other senses.”

Some time went by, and I did other things. But I still wanted to try to remember what it was that felt so important.

“Let’s see if I can backtrack and go back to where I first saw the ‘animal.’ I was thinking about relationships, and how desperate I always used to be to find that ‘perfect relationship,’ the relationship that would ‘complete’ me. I was thinking about the repeating patterns—and then this amazing insight appeared! I still can’t remember it!

“See, here we go again: There are ‘bushes’ in the way of whatever it is that I’m chasing! I should be just allowing it to show itself. But’s hard to feel like you’re so close to an understanding, and yet be unable to grasp it. But actually, it’s sort of a magical place, too. Frustrating but magical.”

And back again to the beginning: “So I was getting ready for the shower, wondering about relationships, and puzzling over the why of it. Oh—wait! I remember: It was the idea of being desperate for a relationship that would somehow let me ‘merge’ with another person.”

Aha! I finally had a tenuous hold on the insight that had shown itself!

“Oh, that’s interesting. My thought of ‘merging….’ What just now flashed through my head was ‘abdication of responsibility.’ Responsibility is the wrong word…. Abdication of opportunity, maybe. Trying, out of pure ignorance, to avoid the responsibility for developing myself as myself. And being quite unaware of my connection to Source.… Out of loneliness and fear I would reach for a relationship, but at some level—Higher Self or higher wisdom, higher consciousness—I was aware that it wasn’t a valid quest. It wasn’t the right question—not the concern or investigation that I came here to do.

“It’s going to take a long time to wrap my head around this. It’s good to have some kind of insight—I’ve not had that before, or only fleetingly. This is the longest I’ve been able even vaguely to hold this stuff…and it just keeps slithering away. That is so cool!”

Looking back, I think that the process I observed is what James Hillman refers to when he says (I’m paraphrasing here), “Don’t drag a dream image kicking and screaming out into the light of day.” This feels like the it’s same kind of thing. You have to let your consciousness expand enough to appreciate the nuance of what’s coming through, and then let it emerge.

When an insight is so slippery, I’m always sure that it concerns an area where I’ve struggled long and hard—a difficult part of my life’s journey. Today, it’s about finding myself and my own strength, and about embodying my true self.

This one is so interesting: We know we’re all connected through Source. At this point I don’t doubt that. The challenge is to BE ourselves, as we take form in this world: to be true to our incarnation, our “becoming flesh,” and at the same time integrate, somehow, the higher wisdom of our true self, our innermost self. It’s an enormous challenge. How can we integrate the truth of our being with the truth of our embodied state?

It seems I’m being reminded of the question. I notice that nobody is offering any answers.

All right. I think I’ve yanked this new understanding as far as I can into the dayworld. Time for it to be on its way, perhaps to show up another day, between the trees, as I watch with soft eyes.

I walked out onto the deck this morning and stepped on something hard: a fragment of bone. I picked it up, and wondered how it gotten there, and what animal it had come from. Then I realized that it was a piece of a deer cheekbone—the remnant of the deer skull, complete with antlers, that had resided out there on the deck for many months. Only a couple of fragments and one tooth remained.

Oh no! What had happened? That skull was dry and old, with nothing left on it—not even hair. Why would an animal try to eat that? It had lain in the woods for months before I found it, and everything edible was long since gone.

Then it struck me: the only creature who would be interested in such a prize would be a domestic dog. Well fed, carefree, with lots of time and energy to drag away such a prize for the sheer joy of chewing.

Immediately, I knew who the culprits were. Neighbors four doors down the street have two dogs that they “can’t” (i.e., don’t bother to) keep in their fenced yard. These dogs are frequently to be seen roaming around everyone’s yards and the common ground, or chasing cars down the street, or lying out in their front yard.

Two weeks ago, through my open office window, I heard a bunch of barking and commotion nearby. I didn’t think much of it until later in the afternoon, when I went out the front door to get the mail and discovered that the commotion had been those two dogs (by then lying peacefully, innocently, back in their front yard) excavating a huge hole under my front porch. I still haven’t had the time to fill it all back in.

I don’t like to be a nasty neighbor, or complain a lot, but I am pretty annoyed about the hole under my porch, and this morning, after I figured out what had happened to the deer skull, I got REALLY annoyed. I wanted that skull! What for? I don’t know. It had been out there for months, and I hadn’t figured out what to do with it yet. But it was MINE!

I sat down to do what I’d come outside to do: meditate on the deck, while the air was still cool and pleasant. Surprisingly, I was able to let go of the incidents without too much difficulty.

After my meditation, I was aware of another image that had appeared to me: a lovely piece of fabric being fashioned into a corset. What on earth does a corset have to do with a chewed deer skull? Clearly, there was a connection. These things are not random.

Hmmm…. Loss of the deer skull: Deer, symbolically, is an Ally of mine, and so the disappearance of the skull was upsetting. My first response was to see the loss as a punishment. “You didn’t do anything with this talisman, so clearly, you didn’t value it. If you don’t value it, you don’t deserve it, so it’s gone now.”

Anger: usually something that clings obsessively to my awareness, forcing my thoughts into its pattern. Anger channels the flow of energy in a non-creative way, if it’s allowed to go on and on. But it feels so good, so righteous, to be angry!

And corsets: They’re designed to restrict and force a woman’s body into a particular shape. No matter how lovely they look, that is what they do.

But with some further thought, I arrived at a different interpretation of the event, and a sense of how it all fits together. “Here’s information from this event. Now you may choose what to do with it.” I can focus on the loss and the anger: I envision myself storming down the street, pounding on the neighbors’ door….

That’s not really useful; nor is guilt. A better response, I think, is to see this as another instance of how the patterns of our behavior function like a corset does: they mold and restrict us to the status quo, and don’t allow us to grow and change.

So I think that’s the information present in this event. After all, I have no need for the skull itself, or the antlers. Instead, I now have this opportunity to choose a different, less habitual way of responding. I also have this one remaining tooth as a talisman to keep the learning fresh.

A good friend and I were enjoying tea and conversation yesterday. We are both experiencing a sudden and unexpected uptick in our businesses, and were sharing the wonder and excitement of that.

My friend mentioned how she’d been getting calls recently from younger clients, and initially had turned them away, figuring they wouldn’t fit in with her “regular,” older, more established clientele—and then she realized that if she herself just opened up to the idea, she could work with these younger folks just fine.

Then it occurred to her to refine her approach to all of her clients. She now interviews them using questions that encourage them to describe what their ideal experiece might feel like—not, as she formerly did, to describe the thing or situation they’re looking for. This new approach has opened them up to new possibilities, ones they might not otherwise have thought about. So she now has new clients and new opportunities.

Her comments reminded me about a seemingly unrelated event that happened a few days ago: I had come home from a riding lesson and couldn’t find my cell phone.

Losing my phone is a pretty regular occurrence, alas, so it was nothing out of the ordinary to have misplaced it.

I looked all through the house, in every room (whether I thought I’d been in there or not). No phone. Well, it must be in the pocket of my coat, I thought. But then I realized I couldn’t find my coat, either.

It was a chilly day, so obviously I had been wearing a coat, and the phone was almost certainly in the pocket. I repeated the search through the house, this time looking for the blue barn coat. Nowhere! I looked and looked, retracing my steps half a dozen times, getting more and more frantic all the while. “Am I losing my mind? It has to be in here somewhere! Where else could it be?”

Finally, I sat down in tears of frustration. And then a voice in my mind said, “Open up.” What? “Open up to other possibilities.”

Oh.

Instantly, I knew exactly where the phone was: in the pocket of the blue barn coat that I’d worn to my riding lesson. I remembered getting on the horse and realizing the coat was too heavy and hot to wear on that mild, rainy day; so I handed it to the instructor. Afterwards, when I gathered up my things to head home, I put on the rain jacket that I had been wearing over the blue coat.

Oh. “Open up to other possibilities.”

Harness horses wear blinders or blinkers on each side of their face to keep them focused on what they’re doing, instead of spooking at everything going on beside them. We humans all “wear blinders” fashioned by our preconceived attitudes or internalized restrictions. These keep us focused, too—but in our case, they often keep us from seeing possibilities that may exist outside our narrow habits of thought and action.

I think that what is happening for both my friend and me in our lives and our business ventures is that we’ve opened up to new possibilities—and that opening up means a greater scope of good things available for us to attract.

It was funny for me to see this idea operating at the scale of a missing phone—but noticing the event makes me realize just how much my life, my daily activities, are affected by my “tunnel vision.” It’s a bit worrisome to notice it in areas that I fret about but don’t focus on, like my messy house (surely there’s a possibility that it could become neat) and my yard (with some time and effort, those weeds could be managed).

Anyway, it was a very interesting conversation. I will make some changes in my thinking!

Photo from Wikimedia Commons.

A friend and I were talking the other night about all the insanity (by real-world standards) that’s been going on in the last couple of weeks—this business with my old computer (which, believe it or not, has returned from the dead and is now working!). How on earth, we wondered, can this really be happening?

Even though I know, based on my own experience, that our lives are not random, when synchronistic events like these occur together with such apparently obvious meaning, I still stop and say to myself, “Huh? Are you sure that really just happened?”

My friend and I did stop and question our sanity here, but our experiences matched, so we had not imagined it. It kind of set us back on our heels and made us think. I don’t remember any string of events happening like this before, where it was so difficult NOT to see the meaning. We were both pretty shocked, even though neither of us is a stranger to odd experiences.

Why was this chain of events so shocking?

In the end, it seems that I’ve finally been pushed over the edge of something, past the point of no return: over a precipice of understanding that I didn’t even know was there.

I’ve been aware of the imaginal world, the operation of synchronicity, and the presence of Guides for years now. I pretty much live that way. My present work, and my dissertation research, all depend on the reality of this other world, this other “dimension,” beyond or within our waking reality.

However, when my utter astonishment over this most recent turn of events surfaced, it made me realize something: In all these years that I’ve been working in this way, there’s a part of me it for whom it was all only theoretically true. It was kind of an intellectual exercise, almost. But now, it’s in-my-face true. It’s right-there-in-real-time, in-the-world, concretely true. There’s sort of no getting around the fact of what’s been happening.

Which kind of blows me away.

Here’s what it feels like: Before, I could accept the reality of the Imaginal when I was in the mood, and treat it as intellectually true when I wasn’t in the mood for it to be true in the real world. Kind of like, “Oh, well, that’s not really real.” When I felt like it.

My, my! What a convenient arrangement with reality!

But this experience isn’t one I can brush aside. Nope. I’ve got a fried computer, a blown out cell phone, pain again, and a whole bunch of dreams to go along with it (did I forget to mention the dreams?!)—all of them telling the same, coherent story. This is “inconveniently true,” but true and real nonetheless.

It’s not fun any more! And it’s getting expensive.

I will definitely need to listen harder and take all of this more seriously. Even as I type this, I’m nervous, still looking over my mental shoulder to make sure no one is standing behind me with a two-by-four….

[The first entry in this series is here, the second one is here.]

In the days following that painful first two-by-four upside the head, I thought about Mom, wondering what her message to me was, and why she was so intent on getting me to hear it.

Mom is something of an enigma. None of us in the family really knew her, it seems. She wrapped her entire life around Dad, and I have no idea, or only hints, at who she herself was or would like to have been. What would she have done on her own, if Dad, two kids, and her sense of duty hadn’t intervened?

All wasn’t bleak in her life—I don’t mean to imply that. But I know, from watching her suffer, and from listening to her in the last few years of her life, that she felt desperately unfulfilled.

One thing is clear: she does NOT want for me to follow in her footsteps. Hence the pain and the vertigo that night: a not-so-gentle wake-up call from my mother. (Thank you, Mom. I love you, and I miss you even though in this moment I can feel your presence.)

Back to the story.

The Tuesday following that nighttime event, I went out to the Ranch, as I usually do. It was another tense and frustrating day, full of excitement as the new class of interns arrived to begin their training. Tons of details to be dealt with and questions to be fielded. No office to work in, my files in two different locations, and an internet connection that flickered on and off, leaving me without a way to access files on the shared drive and unable to send files from my own computer in the upstairs classroom to the Ranch’s computer.

My machine was working fine, though, and I managed to get everything done. Around three I packed up, planning to email the files when I got to the house and to a stable internet connection. Then I drove home, with a stop at the barn to feed the horses.

That evening, I reconnected my computer and went to turn it on… and… nothing happened. It was deader than a doornail.

Dead.

Well, you can imagine my shock and frustration. And I was pissed off! This was so not fair! Not only could I not get to the Ranch email, or update their files, but I couldn’t get to Facebook! Oh no!

Those of you who know me can imagine my anguish! I have to laugh, looking back, because I hadn’t really focused on how much time I spent/spend on the computer. Writing is one thing—I don’t want to go back to longhand—but most of what I was doing was not writing. It was compulsively checking email—my own and the Ranch’s—and Facebook. And (dare I admit?) playing Spider Solitaire online, sometimes for hours.

But no longer, apparently!

Why? Why take away my computer? I hopped up and down and cried and whined…. Again, I “blamed” Mom—in life, she was notorious for being able to knock out any computer she came within ten feet of. Seriously. I’m not the only one who witnessed it. We all got to where we kept her out of the rooms and offices where there were computers.

Whoever or whatever fried it, the fact remained that my computer was defunct, and I no longer had access to the internet.

But I wasn’t giving up that easy—no, not me! I started checking email via my cell phone. Gotcha, I thought!

Well, you can guess what happened next. That’s right—my phone stopped working. I could send and receive phone calls, but not much of anything else. Its buttons didn’t work. No internet, no email, no text messages. The phone’s battery would no longer take a charge unless I plugged it into my car out in the driveway.

I was really mad, but also scared. This second smack upside the head forced me to stop and think.

Think, Kay.

Finally, the link between the two shocks became clearer. Not only was I allowing my volunteer activities to take time away from my own work, I was also spending WAY too much time online.

And it’s not just the amount of time, I realized. It’s the quality of what I’m doing with my time.

The demands that this electronic age has created for us—the expectation of things done in real-time (whatever that is), and that we be constantly available via the Internet, creates a sense of urgency in our lives that makes it difficult or impossible for many of us to practice the kinds of meditative actions that are necessary if we humans are to access any level of reality beyond the mundane on any consistent basis.

I’m not suggesting that many or most of us don’t pray or meditate, or that our culture disallows or devalues prayer—at least some parts of our society take prayer very seriously indeed. And that’s generally a good thing. But what I’m talking about is the kind of meditative practices that allow us to be in touch with alternate states of consciousness, or with states of reality that lie beyond or behind the waking, sticks-and-stones world we generally experience.

I’ve been fortunate to experience the gifts that some of these different levels of reality bring. Much of my work has been done in what’s called, in the depth psychological framework, the imaginal world. This level of reality co-exists with the mundane, everyday world and can be accessed through it, provided one can quiet one’s mind, be fully present, and allow oneself to hear and experience it. [You can find out more information about this in the first few entries in this blog. Start here.]

This is one of the lessons that the mystics—Christian and otherwise—have shared throughout history. But our culture, the one we live in every day, fosters anything BUT mindfulness. I know that was one of the lessons of this computer episode: in the quiet time and space that was created, it became clear that you can’t be quiet inside while you’re completely connected, at every moment, to so many other people through the electronic world.

Here again, it’s not a lesson per se, but a matter of our personal choices. This incident, like its more painful predecessor, was necessary in order for me to become aware of the choices I was unconsciously making—and to choose differently.

That brings up lots of other issues, of course, like the idea of “horse time,” which is always and only in the present moment. Perhaps being with the horses will be a way to engage with the larger reality during more of my waking time. None of us can avoid cultural expectations, but by spending time with the horses I may be able to foster and strengthen the abilities that I clearly have to interact with the imaginal world, with the Guides. That’s my life’s work, after all, and I want to give it my full attention.

I keep hearing “balance” and “moderation.” Not my strong suits, eh? But that’s why they call it a spiritual “discipline.”