I made this card for my Papa on his birthday a couple of years ago but forgot to post it. My Papa has a bit of a spiritual connections to birds. I drew part I of the story for his birthday the previous year, see here. For those of you that are Papa fans, you definitely want to read his write up of his experience in this illustration:
Synchronicity at Allan Gardens:
The following
synchronicity would be a most unusual event under most circumstances but
because of the exact moment in which this happened, the odds at it
being 'just a coincidence' are astronomically large and has served to
change my perception of the world.
This would be the third synchronicity involving
birds in my life. The first one happened 25 years earlier when the dove
landed at my feet. The second one when the black bird crashed against my
windshield. Although those are separate stories, they all form part of a
larger narrative.
Since then synchronicities of "lesser" nature occur
to me very often. Or perhaps it is that now I pay attention to the
meaning of seemingly unrelated events.
For
about a year I had been practicing a standing exercise, which comes from
the Qigong tradition, called "the one to ten meditation" just before
shiatsu sessions. I had been doing this every single time prior to a
healing session with one of my clients. And the intention is to prepare
sacred space and a sacred vehicle (my body, soul and spirit) before
engaging with the client.
I must now recount the basic process of the
meditation or otherwise there would be no context to understand what
happened as a consequence of it. The One to Ten meditation is used by a
healer prior to enter the treatment space and it goes something like
this:
One is fun - I imagine a ball of energy dropping down through my body from above, washing over me like a shower of light;
Two is shoe - I imagine my feet melting into the ground;
Three is tree - I imagine roots growing from the feet and extending down deeply into the Earth;
Four is core - I bring Earth Qi (roughly translated as energy )
from Mother Earth, just as sap in a tree, into the lower belly area, as I
breathe while the belly or lower dan-tien, (which is the term used in
Traditional Chinese Medicine) fills with golden energy;
Five is alive - the energy at the lower belly spills over and
extends upwards into the upper limbs through a central channel, or tube
some call a prana tube and fills the heart and chest;
Six is
thick - all the energy accumulated within me so far pours out of the
fingers and floods the space I am in with a thick energy like a mist;
Seven is heaven - a beam of Qi from Father Sky above enters the
crown of the head, moves down along the pranic tube and mixes in with
the Earth Qi still flowing within;
Eight is gate - all of the
energy that was projected into the surrounding space now enters back
into the body through all the 'gates' or openings, including the pores
on the skin, invigorating and charging it like a battery;
Nine is shine - the gathered energy is now totally re absorbed and
fills the center axis of the body from head to tailbone and then I
imagine the prana tube thus formed as a fluorescent tube, shining a pure
white light which fills a sphere within which I am contained.;
Ten is invoke which means uttering the three invocations - 1) I
invoke the Divine (basically meaning invisible to regular sensing) for
the emptiness of Ego leading to direct knowing 2) for harmony, love and
light in the treatment space and 3) for the highest good of the client
naming him or her by name.
So all this could be thought of by the skeptic in
most of us as pure bullshit. But here comes the synchronicity that
proves this is NOT the case.
I was standing at
Allen Gardens near Carleton and Sherbourne in Toronto in the middle of
the most open space I could find. There is a beautiful green house in
this park that is one of my favourite places in the whole world, but
that's beside the point, except perhaps for the Love that being near
there invokes in me.
So I am talking in the cell phone to my sister in
law, busy pacing back and forth through the many pigeons in my immediate
vicinity. As I pace the pigeons always maintain a respectful distance
as is always the case and one hardly notices this. Suddenly I realize
there are only 8 minutes left to my next appointment. I urgently say
goodby to Roseann my sister in law and put away the cell phone. The
lingering feeling of wanting to help her and my brother to have a happy
life still lingers in me. In other words, love lingers, and I think this
is a key ingredient. But I will explain this in more detail somewhere
else.
Now I must decide, do I go directly to my healing
session or do I do the One to Ten first, which means I maybe a little
late? The decision comes quickly. For sure I will do the preparation
first even if it is "just" a quickie.
So I begin: one is fun, two is shoe, three is tree,
four is core, five is alive, six is thick, seven is heaven, eight is
gate, nine is shine and ten is invoke...
I
stand in a most relaxed way, with feet shoulder width apart, relaxed
knees and arms hanging loose but with open hands extending the fingers
slightly, the tip of my tongue touching the roof of the mouth, breathing
soft and effortlessly, my weight slightly swaying from heels to toes
with every breath. My entire consciousness sinks into the guts of the
Earth as I stand on it, grateful for being alive.
Then I begin: One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, TEN....
I
turn the palms gently outwards and begin to lift the arms in a semi
circle as I breath in and am about to say "I invoke the Divine". At this
point my eyes are closed and my arms have not completed even a third of
the semicircle, and I have not even finished saying "I invok...", when I
hear a big noise all around me. It sounds like something familiar which
nevertheless I have not heard before in this volume: gwrrgwrrrrwwgwrr!
I open my eyes while my two hands are still mid way
in the air and I see what seems to be every single pigeon in the park
flying at high speed towards me. I am frozen in time and astounded
expecting the birds to crash into me any second.
Then they all settle down in front of me, like snow
in a pattern. I look around and the birds are not just in front of me
but also behind and on every side of me, forming a perfect circle at
about three or four feet away from me, with several squirrels also in
the mix. They are all looking at me with one eye or the other, kind of
like wondering, "ok, so what's next?"
I look around thinking there must be a crowd of
people witnessing this amazing event. But all I can see is a sea of
birds extending in the distance. I am totally alone and I feel blessed
and thankful and I immediately understand the meaning of this.
I have received a huge confirmation that my performance of this daily ritual was not at all bullshit, after all.
And
later I rationalize if birds can feel it, and their energy or Qi is
moved by it, so can people, and so can the internal organs, and the
energy, or Qi, in the meridians connected to these organs I work with.
Human beings, we are part of a vaster and mysterious
whole that can only be understood at the deepest level when we abandon
our rational mind and use our hearts to feel our way.
The birds, they are pure heart, they know.
- Papa
