Closure Achieved?

And so it continues.

I had another bird incident. It happened as I was leaving my house on my way to a yoga class. Yoga is, by the way, my new favorite activity. As you may or may not care to know, I am trying to be more accepting of myself and others. Yoga is proving a fantastic complement to this endeavor—especially with regards to how I feel about myself. The instructors are forever saying positive, supportive things and generally validating my self-worth and credibility as a kind and generous person.

The fact that I never actually engage in conversation with these teachers/ready-made fan club and they therefore have no idea if I am actually a good person or a raging miscreant does not detract from the enjoyment I feel as I bask in their encouragement. It is quite a treat to walk into a room and be told that I ought to devote as much of my time and energy as possible to feeling good about how wonderful I am. Actually, rather than deliver orders, they gently suggest as much, making me aware that the invitation to feel wonderful about myself is available for me to accept whenever it feels right.

Incidentally, it feels right most of the time, and I often accept the invitation with pleasure.

So I start out optimistic on a bright Saturday morning: with my yoga mat in tow, the sun is shining and I am excited to make my way to the studio where I pay a monthly fee in return for dedicated time to ponder how delightful I am. As worthwhile an investment as any other, I would say.

Now, the problem with karma is that it finds you with ease and then just sort of lingers around until the moment to strike has ripened to perfection. My moment had arrived. My guard was down. No sooner do I step out my front door am I given an unexpected preview of the class to come. There is a bird on my front stoop, and he is in fish pose.

It was a disorienting sight, and not only because I would have preferred the bird to be in pigeon pose since that would have been more species-appropriate. By the way, fish pose, in yoga, is where you lie on your back and sort of prop yourself up on your elbows while you allow your head to loll backward towards the ground. I am not sure how it earned its name because I do not think fish adopt such a pose unless dead. Maybe its full name is dead fish pose, which would have made sense given my personal circumstance at this moment: birdie looked like he had spiritually flown the coop if you catch my drift.

My immediate reaction involved two components. First and foremost, I did not call my brother. While this may seem an unnecessary detail to include, I often do call my brother when strange and unusual things happen to me. The chances that he will have a story about something that has happened to him that is both stranger and more unusual is a virtual certainty and I feel comforted by how “normal” my life then seems in comparison. Frankly, it is sort of a nice barometer.

But I did not call him. For one thing, Robert lives on the West coast; the time difference combined with the fact that he is quite a man about town, means that it likely would have been too early for him to answer the phone. But the real reason I did not call him is that he is a spiritual life coach and he had just read my story about Larry (see the Closure: A Rather Flighty Business post for details).He is enthralled by evidence of synchronicity and he would have absolutely LOVED the karma involved in the Saturday morning surprise. In my traumatized state of finding a bird corpse first thing in the a.m., I just did not feel like working through the feelings about how and why the universe was sending me a message.

Besides I pretty much knew the message anyway. In sum: Maggie dislikes birds. Despite this potentially unfair sentiment, Maggie then finds herself in a position to help an ailing bird. Maggie makes an unresolved attempt to help sick bird. Maggie feels guilty about the fact that she announced her dislike for birds and about the fact that she does not know if her victim survived or if she caused his imminent and likely gory demise. Maggie will now be reminded by the universe about her unresolved issues in various and unexpected ways until she resolves them.

Yes, I read The Secret.

And, I know about the laws of attraction and that the only way out is through, and that problems do not go away if you ignore them and blah, blah, blah. While it is true that Robert offers incredibly intuitive insight, top notch in fact, it was just too early in the morning to work through my issues. I was not feeling nearly good enough about myself yet, so I decided that I would call him after yoga.

The second component of my immediate reaction is that I did not make any attempt to personally deal with the situation. I am only slightly embarrassed to admit that it did not occur to me. Unsavory and unhygienic business is not my bag, and especially so when a dead animal is involved. For example, a few years ago, I found an almost dead mouse in the guest cottage of my mother’s house where my husband and I were temporarily living. I immediately jumped on the toilet and screamed three to five times. My husband was out of town, so from my perch on the toilet I called my mother from my cell phone. She conveniently lived across the driveway and arrived in a few minutes with a bucket and rubber gloves. She is not afraid of a little gore, my mother. Unfortunately, on this morning of the bird incident, she lived several states away. Fortunately, my husband was inside the house I had just exited.

I opened the door and screamed three to five times.

My husband is used to what I might euphemistically dub my impassioned reactions to the world around me and what everyone else might see as unnecessary dramatics. At one point I think he may have found my propensity to theatrics to be sort of cute. That point may have passed.

Still he is remarkably patient and level-headed in all matters; it takes quite a bit to rattle him. So, when I screech his name at the top of my lungs, despite the fact that he is standing right inside the door and therefore only a few feet away, he merely looked at me and said in a perfectly normal, librarian-style “inside” voice: “Yes?”

“There is a dead bird out here. A DEAD BIRD OUT HERE!!!!!”

“Okay. Go to yoga. I will take care of it.”

This solution sounded both reasonable and the best one available. I was certainly not going to take care of it. And Freya and Bruce (our dogs) seemed only marginally more qualified for the job than me.

In moments like these, I wonder what I would do if I lived alone. I would likely cry a lot more. Perhaps my mom would find herself traveling quite a bit.

So I went to Yoga which was a good thing because now I was starting to feel terrible about myself (did I cause this bird’s death because the universe wanted me to know how I had failed Larry in his moment of need?). I was in desperate need of turning around these rapidly forming negative self-statements. I needed a dose of incense-infused air and a waterfall of positive affirmations about my perpetual loveliness as a human being rather than succomb to this new self-view as an inadvertent bird-killer turned wrath of karma victim.

As class began, the teacher asked us (as they often do), to dedicate our practice to someone. I dedicated my practice to my husband and the bird in fish pose. I felt I had inflicted a certain degree of harm to both of them—to the bird for having failed his species in what was probably a botched attempt to rescue his brother Larry, and to my husband for forcing him to have to deal with the whole unsanitary and sad messiness of it all…and for screaming at him, which was in retrospect completely unnecessary.

After yoga, I felt infinitely better. Not wanting to disturb my om, I did not bring up the bird for a while. When I finally asked my husband, his response surprised me:

“Oh that bird was not dead.”

“What? WHAT?! WHAAAAAAAAAT???”

“I think he just flew into our glass door and knocked himself out for a spell. When I went outside he had flipped himself over and was breathing. So I picked him up and placed him in a tree. He sort of sat around for a minute and then flew off.”

“So what, you think maybe he flew into the door and incurred some sort of headache?” What is it with birds and headaches?

“Yes.”

“So he needed to rest in a cool shady spot until he was fine again?”

“Yes.”

“Do you think his name is Larry?”

“Ummm. Yes?”

Huh. Now I am going to call my brother; he is going to LOVE this one.