Nothing But Swirls and Fenceposts – Photo: L.Weikel

Mixing It Up

If you’ve been reading my posts for any length of time, first of all thank you, and second of all you probably realize that you never know what I’m going to write about from one day to the next. It’s the old “keep ‘em guessing” strategy. You know: mixing it up so you never know if you’re going to miss one of the good ones – making every day’s offering an adventure of discovery.

Yikes. I’m dredging from my college days now, making whip-smart use of that psychology degree by employing intermittent reinforcement to the readers of my blog posts. B. F. Skinner would be proud.

Actually, it’s not intentional. Not in the nefarious way I’m alluding to, anyway. It is intentional in respect to the fact that I try to stay away from writing too much about any one subject. My thoughts do bounce around from one topic to another.

A Niche

I think maybe I thought, or was hoping, I’d have discovered a niche by now. But no. Five hundred forty seven days into the 1111 Devotion project and no discernible niche has revealed itself. I guess I’m just a jack-of-all-subjects and master-of-none.

If you were to take a gander at the photos on my iPhone, though, you might come to another conclusion. You very well might think, “This chick should’ve become a meteorologist. Clearly she has a thing for clouds and other weather events.” And you would not be wrong.

Clouds

I adore clouds. I’m confident this comes as no surprise to any of you. And I particularly love letting my gaze soften when I look to the sky and allowing myself to simply see what’s up there. Like the angel’s wings I wrote about last week, and any number of other posts I’ve share about clouds that have appeared to me in intriguing shapes.

Just a day or so ago, I caught this one:

Fox Chasing Bird – Photo: L. Weikel

In my imagination, I easily see a fox chasing an oversized bird right across the sky.

No, I don’t feel there’s any particular message associated with that image. It’s simply a delight. A whimsical interlude punctuating one of our walks.

And that’s an important aspect of what I do as well, or perhaps how I approach life, that many people don’t realize. I don’t try to wring a message or a lesson out of every single thing that happens to me or that comes to my attention. I know it may seem as if I do, but in truth, there’s a unique sense of significance that I sense deep within when I encounter a ‘message.’

Cultivating that sense is something that comes with practice. But first things first – which means, you have to do a lot of noticing and paying attention to realize which experiences coming your way are messages and which are simply interludes of beauty, or pain, or something else in your life that are ‘only’ important in that moment.

(T-564)