Dear friend,
In the place where the seagull sat, now there is a young crow. Kind of skinny looking with some of its feathers crooked and out of place. They’re balancing on a terracotta chimney pot surveying the street.
I watch to see if they can fly okay and they can, how else could they have reached the roof?
What do they see?
A woman outside the supermarket, deeply distressed, red swollen hands and face, cracked voice, rough with booze and smoke, raw pleading for coins like she’s young, begging for a toy.
For something just out of reach.
A neighbours car, red like a rose, brilliant in the sunshine.
A black bin bag, spilling it’s plastic innards on the pavement, torn open by the night foxes.
A kid skipping to the park.
A man sitting at a desk typing into a silver machine.
A new born baby strapped to its mother protected by a sun hat.
Heart break and laughter.
Michael, two doors down losing his sister to cancer. The wake lasting all day and into the night. Music and hushed voices on the street at midnight. Cars driving off into the morning and a good man left with pieces that won’t go back together.
Some of them lost.
Maybe they’ll turn up a few years from now, jammed beneath the skirting board, and the broken pot will hold water again. Click into place.
“Oh, there you are.”
Francesca, behind the neat front door. Dreading the day Beau takes her on his last walk. Plucky little Jack Russel, visiting her in her dreams.
Stories we walk past when we’ve got someplace important to get to.
Like we do.
The stiff armed sprint of the drug addict on the High Road. Harassed mums and dads on the school run when September comes. Kids in new clothes and hand me downs.
White vans with ladders on top spewing out black smoke at the traffic lights.
Jehovah’s witnesses under the railway bridge.
The fish mongers icing up the days catch.
It’s a rich life when we pay attention.
Come out of our heads and be here now.
Life throws its curveballs and tsunamis.
But we also get to create our lives too.
How do you want yours to be?
Your life in six months?
A year?
Five years?
Write down some goals.
If you don’t know, then ask and listen to the answers that emerge from the mist.
“What do I want?”
The mist is made of “I don’t know” “but that’s impossible” “I could never” “I’m not ….enough” “I’m too …”
Let the mist do its thing.
Focus on the answers.
No matter how odd they seem.
Do you want to learn French?
Design t-shirts?
Grow your own vegetables?
Meet new people?
Work some place else?
Write it down as it comes.
Put them in order.
If you could only have or be or do one of them.
What would that be?
That’s number one.
Keep going until they are all in order.
Now you at least you have a list of priorities.
Goals serve you.
You don’t serve them.
They are signposts.
For personal and spiritual growth.
We are individual rays of the Creative energy which is manifesting all reality.
That’s an awesome power, beyond our ability to comprehend.
Goals are baby steps.
Sometimes leaps.
Till tomorrow
Love
Mikey