the phagos blog

I’ve been learning quite a bit about myself lately, some good, some I want to change.  Today I learned a couple things about myself, and found my faith again - in myself and in Great Spirit, Higher Power, God, Goddess - whatever term you use for deity.  (Warning - lengthy post ahead)

I took the day off work today to take care of some business - which proved a bit traumatic for me.  My first reaction when it was over was to call someone and see if we could hang out for a bit, I thought I wanted some company.  By the time I had gotten home, I completely changed my mind, I just wanted my space, wanted to be by myself.  I’ve noticed that when i go through something intense, my first response is to want to call my friends, usually followed by the decision not to.  In the past, I would have just holed up and not even considered calling my friends.  I don’t call them because I’m not sure if I have the right to do that - I don’t want to bring them down too.  There’s more to it than that, but that’s one of my primary reasons for spending time alone afterwards.

So, having been on emotional rollercoaster this morning, I decided since it was such a beautiful day outside and I was off from work that I was going to go out and enjoy it.  I need to mow the grass badly, and while I enjoy yard work, I didn’t feel like doing that today.  So that left going to a park.  As it so happens, my membership to the local botanic gardens expired at the end of last month, so I decided to go there and renew my membership and hike around the place again.  The nature trail, while not very long, is extremely beautiful and tranquil.  I find it a great place to ‘get away from it all’ without having to leave the city or go very far.

So here’s the backdrop - it’s very early in the afternoon, I’ve gone through a drive-through for lunch because I really want a burger, and in addition to all the turmoil in my head I’m annoyed because now I have soda on my shirt and jeans because they over-filled my drink.  But I’m still happy to be out of the office and listening to the new Smash Mouth cd, which I’ll be talking about in another post.  Traffic was light, so it was a fairly short and uneventful drive to the gardens.

I walk into the gardens after renewing my membership and check on the Lotus plants, but it’s too late in the season and they are done blooming for the year.  I walk across the bridge and under the tall trees, and my thoughts start to settle down.  The rose garden is beautiful; some of the hibiscus and hollyhocks are blooming, and a lot of the roses are blooming for the second time this year.  Roses may be the only flowers that I like as much as lotus flowers, and there were plenty of them.  I walked down to the building at the end of the walled garden and get a phone book and try to call a friend of mine and leave a message, we seem to play phone tag a lot.

I walked back through the rose garden to the beginning of the woodland trail.  A few yards in, I sit down and make another call to another friend I was supposed to meet for lunch today.  Since I haven’t talked to her in a couple days, we never got it coordinated, so just a brief call to touch base and make sure she was ok and to let her know I was too.  Once that was done, I wandered down the woodlands trail.  There’s a place on the trail about halfway through where there’s a huge boulder next to the trail so large 3-4 people could lean back against it shoulder to shoulder, taller than any person that could lean on it.  There must be something about that boulder, I stop there every time I walk the trail, and today was no exception.

The boulder slopes up at a nice angle, so that if rest my head on it I can watch the clouds pass overhead through the break in the forest canopy overhead.  I leaned against that boulder for quite a while today.  While I was there, I felt like the forest was asking me what I wanted, like it offered to carry my prayer to Great Spirit.  I found myself wishing I had brought my pipe to smoke, that I had brought ritual supplies with me.  Since I hadn’t, I just leaned on the boulder and thought about what I wanted to bring into my life.  After a few minutes the desire to pray started to subside, and that’s when I realized - I could feel that prayer spreading into the forest, being carried on the wind to some unknown destination.  The scene from Practical Magic where the rose petals floated away came to mind, because that’s exactly how it felt to me.

I stood there a while longer, and before I moved on, it came to me - I make the decisions about how my life is going to go, but Fate steps in sometimes and says, this is going to happen now.  Sometimes it does that because I asked for it - for better or worse, it just takes a bit to line everything up to bring it about.  And that’s when my faith came back.  I know that everything I asked for this afternoon will come into being as I asked,  Maybe not tomorrow, or the day after that, or not even next week - but it will happen.  My job is not to figure out how, that’s up to Great Spirit - mine is just to ask for what I desire, the Universe will bring it about.  I can’t explain to you how I know this is true, I just know - I have to call it faith for now, since these things haven’t happened yet, but they will.

I left the gardens a different person than I was when I went in.  So, to honor what happened today, I decided to write a poem.  It’s a bit rough still, still a work in progress, but this is what I’ve come up with so far.  I wish I’d taken my notebook with me, I would have loved to have written some of this while I was there.  Perhaps next time.  Without further preamble, here it is.