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.