Angelic guidance: in which I cross the edge of doubt and welcome the wow

OneToday, as I was writing in a local café a man shouted, "Angel! You're an angel!"He wasn't talking to me. He was addressing his remark - and admiration - to the little girl with enormous brown eyes who was seated at the table beside mine.And yet, I can't help sensing that even though he wasn't talking to me, the angels were. This is what I was writing when he called out: After the signs and miracles, after the angels have shown up and proven whatever it is that you need them to prove, it's time to cross over.So, wow. Just wow.TwoA few days earlier, at a different table, different café. I was writing about girlhood dreams, the way they get lost when we are 12, 13, 14, and just beginning to realize there are rules about women and power, rules that make it uncomfortable (and lonely) for those who push, who climb, who 'strive'.Sensing that, somehow, they are 'too much', 'too pushy', or any number of other ways of appearing too powerful, girls begin to sink under the cultural spell that holds them in a lifelong struggle with competing desires: being real vs. being liked; the struggle between holding power and. being powerfully held by the tribe.And then, at midlife, suddenly, organically, these pushed-underwater selves bubble to the surface of their lives for reintegration - and if they don't, we dive down and recover them. We find them there, floating under the water where we left them. Waiting for us to raise them to the surface and paddle them to shore and, with infinite presence and love, to revive them.I was writing about this process of soul retrieval - how we take our rejected and dissociated selves and wrap them in warm towels and invite them to sit around the circle of our campfires: the blogs and women's circles and kitchen tables where women welcome each other home.And as I was writing this, the phone behind the cash register rang and the maitre d answered. “Ophelia,” he said. “She’s not here.” And again, I felt something invisible listening to my thoughts, and responding. Playfully, invitingly. As angels will.(If you don't understand that reference: Ophelia and Reviving Ophelia) And also, wow!ThreeI feel as if I am stepping back and forth across the same line: on one side, I'm a person who believes in angels; on the other side, I'm not.And everywhere I go there are birds: flocks of tiny black twittering starlings which are completely invisible until I open the back door or walk up the block or drive past their colonies in my car. And then, whoosh, they lift from the trees in a cloud of commas, an arc of apostrophes, a symmetry of wings. Once, a flock swarmed my car, startling me, waking me from some idle musing and then, zipping up suddenly before colliding with the windshield.Here's a video of that happening  - just after I wrote this post.FourAnd just yesterday, I was walking toward my favorite café and reviewing it all in my mind -- these signs and how blessed I feel, and how this series of miracles just keeps unfolding, one after the other in a daisy chain of inspiration -- when, as I pulled open the cafe door, a feather swirled through the air and landed on my shoulder.And I came to the table, and opened my book - which happened to be called Radical Presence  - and I opened to all of it. I felt myself turning, expanding and crossing over to welcome the wow.