Books - Birds

 I came to my desk and found a pile of file folders stacked there, after yesterday's closet and cabinet purge:

• The novel I never finished, called Faith
• The memoir that sits, ignored for now, called The End of Men
• The mid-life renaissance book, still forming
• The book about winning the lottery which was not really about winning the lottery
• The one about Sacred Story, the one about Story Alchemy, the one called The Story in your Symptoms
• The one about FLOW that I wrote before my friend, Elissa Stein, wrote, designed and published, her book called FLOW

#JustSayinI have piled them up before, thousands of pages neatly (and not so neatly) tucked into folders, a mountain of incompletion - of good intentions left idle when some bright butterfly zipped by to distract meWhat makes me keep starting them, hopefully, certain that this time, I am ready to pull one all the way across the ocean of time and effort it will take?What made me, today, when I am already overwhelmed with other projects, get them out again...... and sort through them like a stack of divination cards?Wondering, which book will:

• Define me
• Give me a name.
• Breathe me to life
• ?

What journeys we have already made - these books and I. Companions.Evidence of interior worlds, stacked there, exterior, looking at me with a knowing "I".Yesterday, just before I met with a new client, hundreds of black birds landed on my lawn.I reached for my video camera: birds on lawnThe music in the background was playing when the birds arrived, wings flapping. It's A chakra meditation I do before working with a client.I turned. There they were.This was not their first visit - they've been following me, flocks of them, lifting from trees as I pass - assembling on wires outside the cafe where I write. I love the way they gather, chattering, communal. Nattery and argumentative. Tender and loving. Accommodating, allowing, making room. Pushing and shoving. As the last bird alights, in a magic pattern language I will never understand, the entire flock lifts off. It seems to me, they have been waiting for her.---I put my camera down. The phone rang. I talked with my client. She led me down corridors I have not been down before.That night: I had a dreamThis is what I meant when I told that client: Once you open up a soul question, your life becomes a mystery school: Everything is your teacher. Layers of guidance, sliding over and under each other like veils, concealing, like sails, setting us free.