“Life is a bowl of cherries” is a metaphor that acknowledges the blessings in our lives every day.
Life in this dualistic universe must always have its Ups and Downs that help us grow and learn–when we choose to–through hardships and problem-solving. Yet I find myself reflecting on this past month’s plus road trip—tonight on my final hotel stop en route back to Colorado—and contemplating about several miracles I have witnessed and been the recipient of over this past five weeks.
How do you define a miracle? This varies somewhat for each of us but to me a miracle manifests the extraordinary in a manner that protects, or intervenes, or heals such that Divine or spiritual/ universal intervention appears to be fortuitously playing Its hand.
Miracles might be small or large, life-saving or sometimes even playful. My sister rolling her second all-aces Yahtzee within just a few turns while the lyrics “Do it again!” were playing was enough to capture our attention and for me and two of my sisters to call into question the Law of Probability, especially when just two turns later I also rolled the same all-aces Yahtzee. We wondered if our father, who had always been a gaming sort, was trying to communicate from the Beyond!
Then there was my dear Mother, who is experiencing late stage Parkinsons disease, sitting up in her wheelchair to eat a hearty, pureed meal at her nursing home on the very same day she was subjected to multiple tests and a procedure to drain fluid from around her lungs at a hospital; this was a miraculous, joyful blessing indeed. I have learned to appreciate from Mom’s patience with her condition how the smallest kindness from others in her physically incapacitated state is itself a blessing of universal, divine love.
But five nights ago, a miracle was needed in a life-threatening emergency, and there it was. I could have been injured terribly when I stumbled and fell from my sister’s stairway, falling full-body backwards into her dining room furniture, landing on my back. Fortunately—no, in retrospect miraculously, fortuitously—I had set up a stainless steel, 5 foot tall pet gate, wrapped into several overlapping layers, at the base of my sister’s stairs to provide a boundary between house floors for my dog Sophie. When I fell, I landed squarely upon the central gate panels, which crashed down with me into my sister’s dining room. The several overlapping steel gate layers bent from the weight of my fall but cushioned my back and also somehow prevented me from hitting my head. I laid there on my back for several minutes, both me and my horrified sister fearing the worst but then I got up, my back, left ankle and knee sprained a bit but I was not seriously injured at all. A great “energy-healing” massage a couple days later and I am fine, gratefully aware of how this ‘convenient’ gate possibly saved my life or bodily well being.
Reflecting later on the “anatomy” of this miracle, I realize what a “set up” had occurred in advance. My sister and I had talked at length when I arrived about whether I needed to set this gate up, and overlapping the panels was done in a way that would protect her wooden floor which, in the end, was also miraculously not marred by the crashing fall!
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So I invite you to take some time to reflect and count the everyday miracles in your own life that have helped to put you where you are right now. Even unforeseen difficulties can count as miracles if they lead to greater personal awareness or understanding. I mean, even if my fall would have turned out badly, that could also have had a miraculous element to it if it would have led to later experiences I would grow from.
I believe we are all in the hands of loving care, if only we ask to be and/or if we can remember to recognize the value of even the smallest “set ups” or shifts of conditions in our own and in others’ lives.
So let’s celebrate our tandem connections with Spirit/ the Universe; what Jung would call Synchronicity.
I value and welcome YOUR Comments and Stories.
Better Endings 