Listen Up.

If you can't hear the angels, try quieting the static of worry.  ~Terri Guillemets

Synchronicity, coincidence, chance, luck, twist of fate? There are many words for the phenomena’s that occur everyday but that we only really take notice when we are paying close attention.

Did you ever find yourself thinking of someone and then the phone rings and it’s them? Happens all the time right? Forget your keys in the house and run back in, only to just miss an accident that you would have been involved in if you had left on time?

Maybe these events are just merely happenstance. Who really knows for sure?  Maybe its just dumb luck.

Do we have faith that our cell phone can shoot some sort of invisible beam into the sky and it bounces off a satellite and we can call half way around the world in 10 seconds and make it sound like we are standing next to the person we are calling? Why yes, of course we do. We don’t know how it works because we aren’t all scientists but why wouldn’t we blindly believe that this invisible thing that we don’t fully understand works? It’s a scientific fact!

Yet when we have a “gut” instinct that turns out to be true, well that’s just a fluke. Why? Because someone we don’t know and have never met who wears a lab coat didn’t prove it? I think we are smarter than that. Learn to trust your instincts. Your body doesn’t lie to you. Learn to listen to what it is telling you. It can tell you the truth long before your mind can. Instinct can save your life. When the hair on the back of your neck stands up straight when something scares you and you remove yourself. How do you explain, “I just knew I had to get out of there.” How did you know? A friend of ours had a seizure while driving recently. His car went through the window of a popular bakery of mother’s and kids at 7am in the morning, but the day before there had been a fire and the bakery was closed for the day for minor repairs. Is that just lucky or is there a guardian angel that worked hard to make that accident a lot less painful than it could have been.

I was driving in the car the other day with my husband on our way to my daughter’s parent’s weekend at school. I had just read a book by Lorna Byrne called Angels In My Hair. It’s a book about how this woman in Ireland sees and speaks to angels. Believe what you want, who knows if she does or if she doesn’t. It was still a good story regardless. So I started telling my husband about it and he was sort of half listening to me. He was driving along in quiet reflection. He had told me the night before how he was thinking about his dad who had passed away 10 years before and how he would be so proud of our daughter and what she was up to and how he wished he could be here to see it. So we are driving along and I’m telling him about the book and then a song comes on the radio and he says, “This is one of my Dad’s favorite songs!” Oh, that’s nice, I said. (Hello, I am talking about Angels and the signs they give when they are near, can you please stay focused??)

 So I keep going with my story and the next song comes on and again my husband is excitedly saying, “He loved this one too!”  The next three songs that proceeded to come on could have been taken from my father in law's “playlist” he would have had if he were alive for iPods.  While chatting, I was simultaneously playing a word scramble on my phone. (Talk about doing everything we possibly could to keep from being still and quiet!)  all of the sudden the board reboots and the three letters in the center spelled my father in law’s name. And it finally hit me. He was there. He was bashing us over the head trying to tell us, but he was there! Can I prove it? Nope! Do I believe it, sure, why not? I certainly can’t prove or disprove it. But to think that we have angels among us is a pretty comforting thought. How often do we ask for "a sign" and then we get it and we say, "well, give me a better one." Huh? Trust your instincts!

Since then I have been trying to see if I can notice the whispers, see the synchronicities and recognize the “lucky” things that happen. I have kind of made it a game of how many times “something” happens. It is actually an amazing experiment!

Having a regular Reiki session, meditation practice or just making time everyday to sit quietly can enable you to be more “in tune” to the subtleties of these twists of fate. Granted we got a message loud and clear with a ton of distractions, but if this is a subject that interests you try Reiki or sit in meditation or just try sitting in nature minus the iPod for just a few minutes a day. Breath deeply and evenly and just listen to the sound of your breath moving in and out and feel yourself relaxing and connecting to what is meaningful on a deeper level. I believe a regular practice of any of these kinds of modalities will let you in on the nuances of noticing the synchronicities, thus enabling you to establish a deeper body, mind and spirit connection.

Don’t believe it? That’s ok, you don’t have to. Who knows what to believe? I can’t prove how my cell phone calls China either, but it do!

10 Years

Strength does not come from physical capacity. It comes from an indomitable will.

- Mohandas Gandhi (Mahatma Gandhi)

I remember being in the parking lot of the WHB Nursery School that morning. It was our youngest daughter’s first day and it was only an hour so the mom’s all got coffee and hung out to chat. For some reason we had the radio on and all of the sudden it sounded like War of the Worlds. The announcer was yelling and confused and scared. I called my friend who is married to my husband’s cousin. (Before 9/11 we didn’t really know where our family and friends worked, it was always just “He’s downtown.” Now you sort of know where everyone works and its information we tuck away but hang onto just in case.) She was crying when she answered and said “Michael is gone. Pray Michelle gets home safely.” I sank to my knees in the parking lot and cried. Her brother in law, my husband’s other cousin and our daughter MJ’s godfather worked at Cantor and was killed along with all of his co-workers. His wife worked at Amex and she eventually made it home to their baby son Matthew. Life as we knew it was over. As the day went on more and more of our friend’s names were added to the list of the dead or still missing at that point. But they were all gone.

I remember the clearest blue skies I had ever seen in the days that followed. I remember a monarch butterfly migration that happened that September. Thousands of butterflies were everywhere. It was amazing. Around that time I read an article in Vanity Fair that said after WWII was over the people who liberated the concentration camps in Europe reported that all over the barracks in several different countries carvings of butterflies were found. Those who were about to transition had instinctively carved them in Russia, Germany and Poland.

I remember driving on the LIE in October and someone beeped his or her horn and my husband looked at me and said, “It’s over.” Meaning that feeling of being united and standing together stronger than we were before against a common enemy was ending and people were already going back to the old ways. Road rage still existed. We just forgot about it for a little while.

We have watched a lot of children grow up without their father’s. A lot of widows try, and hopefully succeed in moving on with their lives.

Nothing will ever be the same after that day. We think of it in terms of before and after. We were the generation that didn’t grow up with any real threat. The Berlin wall went down in the 80’s. Who besides the Russian’s could ever hurt us?

We mourn the loss of dear friends when we see their children and grandchildren and know they are watching from somewhere. Just not physically here with us. My husband just said to me the other day, I still try not to cry everyday thinking about the boys. Ten years later, the heartbreak is still just below the surface.

The thing I learned the most was even when the scariest thing we can possibly imagine happens, life goes on. Tremendous joy is somehow able to simultaneously live beside extreme heartbreak. The sun still rises and sets no matter what. People still beep their horns, babies are born, people find out they have cancer and get married and divorced. Life continues on. But we are stronger than we think and we already have everything we need within us. Just when the caterpillar thought it’s life was over, it turned into a butterfly.