So you know that I have been trying very hard to learn how to relax, which isn’t easy WHEN THE FATE OF THE FREE WORLD DEPENDS ON YOU, or at least, you know, someone has to buy the groceries around here. It is a curious fact of my life how often these two things feel exactly the same. (Yes, I know they are not. I’m just saying.)
So my buddy Debz did another of her famous guided meditations this summer. You remember Debz:
Debz has an amazing capacity to believe in things she can’t even see, which we know is a capacity I do not possess, but I am willing to imagine things, and she is willing to help me out.
So she always starts out with us imagining that we are going through a gate or a portal or some such, and the first step is to look at the gate. This time mne was a big plastic button, and I had a conversation with myself about how a button is not a gate, but I rarely listen to anyone, including me, and when the time came to go through the gate, I pushed the button and then the world I was in blew up, which was unexpected, and also possibly a cautionary tale about pushing big white buttons.
So I fell in a shower of stardust into a new country. I landed in gemstones with rubies and sapphires and emeralds. I do like sparkly things.
Debz wanted us to think of this world as a fairy-tale land and to look around and see the creatures there.
“One of them is your spirit guide,” she said, “and when you’re back in your reality you’ll see it all around you.”
So I saw a dragon, but since dragons don’t exist in my reality, I knew that couldn’t be it.
(Those are supposed to be scales on the dragon, but it looks like he is wearing a sweater vest. I sort of love the idea of my dragon wearing a sweater vest.)
Anyway, dragons don’t exist so I went looking around for a creature that does. There was a winged horse, and that was cool, but the horse wasn’t my spirit guide because of course winged horses don’t exist in my reality either. So I asked the winged horse if it was there to bring me to the other spirit guide and the horse was all, “Your spirit guide is RIGHT THERE, you ninny.”
So I went eyeball to eyeball with the dragon. He belched flame.
Now, the last time a quantum creature belched flame I got all worried about touching him and ended up getting burned anyway, so this time I thought, “Aha! The lesson here is to understand the flame cannot hurt me!”
But then the dragon curled his claws around me, brought me into the shelter of his wing, and said, “You are supposed to get out of the way of fire! What kind of idiot are you?”
Whatever.
So I looked up at the dragon and said, “You don’t exist in my reality, so how can you be my spirit guide?” whereupon—and in an extremely annoyed fashion—he burst into ten thousand pieces, a bunch of lizards scurrying around.
“Better?” he asked.
Ha, ha.
So as we were winding down, Debz said to look for our spirit guide in the real world. The next week, I went on vacation with Jessica, and what did I find? That South Florida teems with tiny lizards. “It must be a sign!” I thought.
The second evening we were there, a black-and-white cat trotted by with one of the lizards, now dead, in its mouth. I found it a somewhat disconcerting experience.
It was probably also a sign, although I haven’t got the slightest clue what it means. Stop looking for signs in the world, maybe. That’s not where someone like me will ever find them.