“365 Days of Mindfulness” [Day 46] Angels, Miracles & Mindfulness…

Tis the season… but there’s more…

When I started this journey of 365 days of mindfulness I had no idea what would come up. Because I had been a writer all of my life, writing passionately and prolifically since I was 9 years old, and had taught journal classes for nearly 40 years, the nature of which is to toss out a partial phrase, do a timed writing like shooting the gun at the beginning of a race — POW! GO! 10 minutes! — I knew that I could dive in and always come up with something, and it’s easier when there is a central focus, in this case mindfulness, which is also a decades long practice in my life. What I didn’t know was that this writing would, after writing very openly about my life for decades, be some of the scariest writing that I would do. And it gets scarier by the day.

The thing is if you are going to write about the same topic for 365 days you are going to have to stretch because while it is a daily practice, many times, many, many moments throughout the day, you can only talk about going slow, staying in the moment, and watching your breath just so many times before people are going to start nodding off. I decided to allow whatever rose to the surface on a particular day to be the topic and find out how it was related to mindfulness, as it always is in some form or fashion, because it is the central practice of my life. The bi polar disorder that I live with demands it. Every single day of my life, without fail, will at times have its slippery slopes, and God help me some days it feels like I’m on the luge and I guarantee you I never win any gold medals, not even a bronze. I am dedicating a year of my life to writing these blog posts because it is the most important thing that I have to share, and to teach, in the world. My mindfulness practice has kept me from careening around a curve and sailing right of the edge of the Matterhorn but some days it has been frighteningly close.

The other thing is that when you write what I always refer to as “First Person Personal” prose you go pretty deep, sometimes you cringe, and sometimes people around you cringe, but I have kept my revelations to pretty specific subjects. I write about sexual abuse, being bi polar and other mental health issues, and even coming out as a lesbian with a degree of comfort that many people don’t understand, but I write about these things because I want to help other people. If what I write can help someone else feel less alone then I have done something that matters to me. I don’t want to just write. My writing is, for me, a form of service. It is what I want to do, what I have dedicated my life to doing. But something else has started happening here. I have begun to reveal things that so terrified me during or after I very nearly didn’t publish them, but I am on deadline here folks, every 24 hours a new post goes up and once I’ve written it, well, thar she blows matey! I don’t have anything else to give. I do the best I can and God help me when I have revealed something that makes me cringe I can deal with that more easily than missing a day.

This has led me to write about my embarrassing tendency toward “Operatic Cooking,” and even, a couple of nights ago, realizing (I had no idea where that entry was going and by the time I’d admitted that well, yes, maybe I do want to be loved — Lordy I nearly choked on that!) that there was a tender little part of me that longs to be loved, it was too late. The cat was out of the bag. I still feel sheepish about that.

There are other things that I haven’t talked about because even for me some things are private. And there are things that I just don’t want to get into a debate with people about. I don’t talk politics, I don’t get into arguments with people in person, nor online, and my own brand of spirituality is too eclectic for a lot of people. I am surrounded by people who either don’t seem to believe in anything at all, or believe so ardently in their own particular path that I have been told that I was going to hell because my own belief system was too inclusive of many paths. The point that I am making here is that it has become obvious that I am going to end up talking about all kinds of things that I never intended to, or thought I would. I imagine sometimes I will sound like Pollyanna and sometimes I will sound daft, and other times people might think I should start writing for The National Enquirer because my ideas about things are so far out there. I’m fairly certain I won’t be writing about martians. I have never seen one — yet — they are not on my radar. What I do write about are things I feel very deeply about and believe with all my heart, and if you don’t believe in what I am writing about, or you disagree, honestly, that’s just fine, because I have learned that we all have different truths, we all see the world through our own lenses and our prescriptions vary widely, most of us were brought up in some sort of religious tradition, and a lot of use don’t follow them anymore, but some of it will have stuck, and with the other things we have picked up along the way we may have come to some pretty complex, colorful, and interesting conclusions. I don’t have to agree with somebody, say, to enjoy reading their work, in fact I find it fascinating to consider other people’s views as long as they are not unkind or hurtful to anyone, I am wide open.

I think this has been a bit of a long prelude because I am about to dive off the deep end with something that I am absolutely shocked I am going to write about. Seriously I typed the title at the top hours ago after I designed the graphic for the piece. I wanted to write about angels and miracles and I still want to, I am going to, but somewhere along the way something so blew me away I had to just stop and think about it for awhile. Whoo-whee, this just has me kind of awestruck.

So there I was, planning on writing a piece about how we should be angels for one another in our lives, how we should help assist in the creation of miracles for other people. It is beautiful energy to give and receive and I truly believe that instead of obsessing about getting what we want we should pray for it, in our own way, as I am praying for a miracle in my life right now, and I have my practices and rituals around the calling in of the things that are holy in my life, and asking humbly for help, but it came to me that the best approach would be to do what I felt in my heart was best along those lines and then release it all to the universe and while I am letting God, Mother Mary, all of my angels, the saints I pray to, my spirit guides and so on, do their work, I would turn away from my own self interests and see what I could do to help others. Sometimes the angels that go unawares are really people that love us very much acting on our behalf behind the scenes. And there are usually people involved in the creation of miracles even if it is unbeknownst to them at the time. But then there is something else, something bigger, something fantastical, something that has left me sort of shell-shocked in the best possible way.

I would like to say, first of all, that what I am about to share I believe absolutely positively 100% to be true and this is sort of one of those things I am standing up on my baby legs with in public so really if you, well, not only disagree but think I am: a.) stupid … b.) kooky … c.) The spawn of the devil … or  d.) Need the dosage of my meds raised WAY higher (That might always be the case, such is the nature of my screwball brain.) I am asking you to kindly keep it to yourself. I’m scared out here folks. I’m scared but I’m going to get this out anyway. Here… I … Go…

Angels. (Yes, angels, please kind of crowd in around me and hold me up. I truly know that you are there and that you can.) I was watching an absolutely incredible program on Gaiam t.v. which I recently subscribed to and am in love with. And yes it is a lot of metaphysical/spiritual material and more and just wonderful. The show that I was watching tonight was called “Angels of Atlantis” with Stewart Pearce.

Now before you start rolling your eyes I have to tell you that not only is Stewart Pearce brilliant he worked with Margaret Thatcher and Lady Di to name a couple and worked as an advisor on cultural matters and things of that sort. I could have listened to him all day. So well spoken and intelligent. But the thing that flipped me over on my head was when they were talking about the evidence today of spirits, angels, auras, and all kinds of things that seemed woo woo-y before but now there is science and technology that can show a lot of what people could never see before. Then they started showing pictures of what they explained were the ways that angels appeared over and over, around the world, countless times. Angels appear, they said, as orbs of light. In different colors. What they showed next nearly made me go flat out on the floor. They showed a series of photographs that were filled with pink orbs of light. Why was I so struck with this you ask? Because I have been taking photographs out here at night for months and over and over, not every night, never in the same place, under all different kinds of weather and atmospheric conditions, I have picture after picture after picture filled with these EXACT SAME pink orbs.

Exactly.

The.

Same.

I have even shared them here on the blog and on FB and Twitter and said that I always knew there was magic at Dragonfly Cottage, well, I guess pink angel orbs are pretty gosh darned magical. Here are a few and they are absolutely unretouched photos, taken outside at night anywhere from late spring to 3 or so weeks ago. They were taken with my phone camera which is what I take every single picture with that goes up on the net or elsewhere, and these pink orbs never show up during the day and not on most nights. When they do they are all around me wherever I am…

I have no explanation for these, nor, in fact, do I need one. I have always known there were angels all around me and this is all the proof I need. We all have different views of things and I completely respect the fact that people might think I’m daft. The thing, you see, is that if you think I’m daft you won’t have been the first and certainly not the last and if you only knew how scared and trembly I feel just putting these up, well, let’s just say I am. Perhaps there is a logical explanation. But I don’t really care about the logical. I care about the magical, the divine, the unanswerable, the mystical, the mysterious, I am, in a word, enchanted.

If, on top of everything else, you are wondering what in God’s name pink angel orbs, whether you believe in them or not, have to do with mindfulness, well I will say, as I have on other occasions, that they have everything to do with mindfulness. Were I not absolutely, positively, dedicated to the truth in each and every moment, were I not almost hyper aware of the way a single breath leaves the body and floats on the airwaves, had I not sat through hundreds of thousands of moments believing that I could make it from one day to the next because I lived in each moment and believed, with all my heart, that all the beauty, and wonder and countless unexplainable things were true miracles in God’s universe that I was blessed to see because I sat my butt right down and let the whole wide world come to a halt at.that.very.moment, over and over and over again, well, had all of that not transpired I might question myself. But I don’t.

I have been here and I will be here breathing, and stopping, and, suspended in the air in the middle of countless magical moments, I will see fantastical things that you will likely miss if you don’t also take this journey through your own days.

I see angels. I see a lot of other things I’m not going to talk about right now but I do see angels. And I do want to say, before I head out of this entry, that what I started out to say at the beginning is real and true and a very important thing that we can do.

No matter what you think of me, be somebody’s angel. It’s so easy. There are all kinds of angels in the world and if we ever needed angels we surely need them now.

Be somebody’s angel.

And be a miracle maker in someone’s life, or help assist in making someone’s dream come true, in whatever way that you can. This is surely a time of year for angels and miracles, but we need them all year long. I think I am going to be a crusader for all things magical and miraculous, angelic and kind. Even if it is taking homemade cookies to a lonely neighbor, or giving a handmade doll to a child who wouldn’t otherwise have one this Christmas, I will be an ordinary kind of non-orby sort of angel. We have those here at Dragonfly Cottage too.

Comments

  1. Dearest Maitri, I can’t ask you not to be afraid but I can tell you that it means so much to me (and, I’m sure, others) that you share so deeply of yourself. Once again, you have smacked me right between the eyes. I have been afraid to share things and have given in to the fear. I am sure I have missed some wonderful experiences in doing so. So, in honor of your courage I promise to try to be more open and ask my guides to provide those with whom I feel safe and need the message. So, again, thank you for this wonderful 365 days of mindfulness. On another note, I love your habit of getting out in the evening/night and observe your world right there in your own back hard. With the snow on the ground (I’m near Chicago) I have discovered I have quite a few critter neighbors: bunnies and squirrels I new were there but I also discovered a racoon has passed across our front porch so close to the house and saw deer tracks in the alley. These tracks in the snow made me smile. I burst into giggles when I noticed squirrel tracks on the roof of the garage. Apparently squirrels like to play in the snow just like us. You are helping me notice things in my world. Thank you SOO much.

  2. Dear Paula,

    First of all thank you so much for taking time to comment. It was really scary stepping out with a piece like this and then when you creep in and no one has commented you start quaking in your boots. “Maybe THIS time it was too much…” But the thing is it is never too much, it is just enough for where I am right now in this very moment. The next piece that will go up is, again, a revelation. They are unfolding like the thousand petals of the lotus flower, each one shimmering and glimmering with inner truths being born that I have needed to see and find and they are each coming forth in their own perfect time. And so it is…

    And my eldest daughter, who will be here for Christmas, lives in Chicago and I was raised in Southern Illinois and lived there until I was 26. I know that area very well. And yes I have to be outside at all times of day and night. It is where I reconnect and am grounded again and again and again, and aren’t the animals just wondrous creatures? Whether the domesticated animal companions that I live with inside or the great variety of wild animals I live with outside, I need them all to feel connected to the earth, to feel love, truth, peace, and to be right with myself. I understand this so well. I am watching one of my darling squirrels as I type this and I have countless bird feeders all around my studio windows so I watch a constant stream of wild birds all day long.

    Oh, the beauty that is all around us every single day…

    Blessings and love to you dearheart. Thank you for coming here to share in communion with me. It is a gift and not one I take for granted…

    Maitri

  3. Maitri, just for your information. Perhaps why you haven’t gotten more replies, the last 2 days my copy has not come by email but I went direct to your website…. I just assumed it was a problem with our system. We often have glitches thanks to the local cable company – I won’t mention names. LOL So trust everyone who really wants to will find you.

  4. Heavens! You know yesterday there were no comments at all and that has been uncharacteristic of the responses I usually get here, not to say of course that you ever know or can count on these things just that in over a month and a half there is a core of people who respond regularly so when no one does it makes me wonder if something is amiss so thank you for letting me know. I JUST sent the newsletter out that goes with this entry, there was a lag time, but usually I send the newsletter out right after the pieces goes up. I am just working in many directions at once right now and trying to balance it all! And it always goes out on my 4 FB pages and Twitter too. Goodness, there must be fairies playing about in the interwebs! 🙂

    Thanks for letting me know honey, I appreciate your thoughtful note!

    Love,

    Maitri

  5. Maîtri – that was absolutely beautiful. How absolutely blessed you are to have so many pink orbs around you! What gave you the idea to take the pictures?

    • Hello Brenda, 🙂

      First of all, thank you, I appreciate your kind comments very much.

      Next, you must be new to my work. I constantly photograph everything around me all day long. I take hundreds of photographs every month. They find their way here to the blog, to my 4 Facebook pages, Twitter, books that I am working on, or they find their way into my art. Because I have four dogs as well as being an avid gardener I am outside a lot and at all hours from early morning to late night and sometimes into the weesmas, the wee small hours of the night. I like to take photographs at night because you can get some eerily beautiful photographs that you can’t during the day and I like to play with light. My cottage opens into the woods at the back all the way down to a creek so most of my photographs are of my animals, gardens, and nature. In the last year the pink orbs have started appearing more and more, I have tons of them, but I never knew what they were. I felt they were magical, but not until I started seeing them, now in more than one place, referenced as angels, did I have any clue what they were. I was just captivated by them. I didn’t try to photograph them, I wasn’t looking for them, they just appeared. As I said, I am simply enchanted…

      Blessings to you dearheart,

      Maitri

  6. Just when I think you have surpassed yourself and blown me away with your latest post, you go and do it again! Too lovely and miraculous for words. I saw those orbs in a photo of Wayne Dyer when he was speaking in Assisi, Italy…just magical! Thank you again for giving me hope and reminding us all to be angels to others. You are an angel!

    • Sweet Donna, thank you so much for your kind note…

      They are lovely aren’t they? 🙂 And the thing that I have realized since writing that piece last night which was very much in the moment in what felt like an exciting act of discovery, living with my pink orby angels and not understanding what I was seeing, was that the more that I saw them the more they appeared. As I look back now it is as if the more I was open to them the more they came. Tonight I had a breath-taking time outside that just left me laughing delightedly and talking out loud to them. I was taking lots of pictures of the moon — I love to get good moonshots when Mama Moon glows brilliantly against what looks very like a black velvet sky, but tonight there was literally something pink whizzing back and forth in front of the camera. I stayed out there forever. I would move a little, get a different angle, and then take lots of shots and this pink whiiiizzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz, WWWHOOOOOSSSHHHH kept shooting across the camera. Finally I truly came to realize that this light being was just as delighted as I was. It had the energy of a fairy. I tried to use the video camera but it doesn’t work with that. As soon as I went back to still shots, whoooosh! There it came again. It happened so consistently — and never before — that I realized tonight that the more open we are the more visitations we will be graced with. I care not one whit whether anyone believes me. I know what I am seeing and feeling, I am not making it up and the camera shots are evidence of what I am describing. Something is happening here and I am entering a new and very powerful period of my life, and at the same time it feels more like sweet, innocent child’s play than anything else. I am simply delighted!

      Much love to you dear one,

      Maitri

  7. Pink angel orbs float
    into Maiti’s universe
    miracles now shared

    Priceless magic lives
    all around us every day
    see with the eye’s heart

    thanks so much for this tender and wow entry xo ka

    • Thank you so much beautiful sister Ka…

      I so love your poetry and this one delighted me down to my toes. What is happening here dearheart? I haven’t a clue, but there is magic afoot and I couldn’t be happier.

      You know something just occurred to me that kind of bowled me over. I have felt sad for a very long time, decades really, about the fact that living with so much abuse I never really learned how to or felt comfortable playing. I am very awkward and shy and feel very threatened to the point of terror if someone tries to make me play. It feels too out of control, it doesn’t feel safe. And yet, here I am, dancing with angels in my garden and I truly believe I have just had my first real live encounter with a fairy tonight. In my 60th year I just might be beginning to learn how to play. Is that not just the most marvelous thing EVER?

      I feel kind of little girl giddy…

      I love you sweetheart…

      Maitri

  8. Teresa Myszka says

    Dearest Maitri, I love this post & I absolutely believe in Angels, I’ve had 2 Angel encounters in my life and since the first one ,decades ago, I’ve believed, loved and listened to my Angels. Thank you for sharing.

  9. Hello Teresa Honey, hello!

    Angels are the sweetest, most delightful, loving, and yet powerful and healing entities there are, and the thing is of course everyone doesn’t believe in them, or see them, or care to, and that’s just fine. We all have our purpose here, we are driven by passion and desire and some inner urge to seek and experience what we do in life, and there is just so much one might see or feel or touch or experience or learn, well, of course it’s too much for any one lifetime. I am just glad the angels are making themselves known to me, they are healing me as well as deeply enhancing my healing abilities. Things have been happening that I will not write about, not now anyway, but they are downright astonishing.

    I am so glad that you, too, love the angels. May their magic continue to touch our lives ever and always…

    Love,

    Maitri

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