Featured Story

Signs
by Kim Wyatt

At the beach today, seven Canadian geese landed on the water in a V-formation. Geese are the symbol of migration, the great cycle of life, and also loyalty—they stick together and are monogamous. It always makes me sad when I see one goose. I wonder what happened to the other half of the pair.

On my way home, I think about what I can learn from the geese. Seven is the number of deadly sins, the number of spots on a ladybug, of the world’s wonders. There are seven chakras, seven samurai, and seven secrets of highly successful people. Seven is the atomic number of nitrogen, which constitutes 78 percent of our atmosphere.

At the stoplight, two ducks walked in front of my car. Ducks mean water and water means emotions. Two is a balanced number. Maybe I’m supposed to be more in balance and not get so hysterical.

Do I listen to the geese or to the ducks, or to both?

Ben came home to pick up some clothes. He said he needed some time away. He packed blue clothes. I’ve read that people who wear blue are reliable; I’m sure he’ll be home soon. In Buddhist philosophy, blue is the color of the sky and ascension. I must try to achieve a higher state of being, and then maybe he’ll come back. I won’t get the blues, that’s for sure.

I stood in the rain today and let it wash over me. Rain is cleansing, it means new life. I stood for as long as I could, until even my brain was cold, and washed away all the negativity. It ran right into the storm drain at 12th and Main. I love knowing that’s where it is.

The other 22 percent of our earth’s atmosphere is made mostly of oxygen, argon, and carbon dioxide. I like the word argon; I didn’t know argon was in the air. It’s kind of comforting, knowing that argon is a constant companion, like a parrot on my shoulder. I didn’t even know what argon was, but now I do. It’s an inert gas. I wonder what it has to do with Jason and his Argonauts.

Today I woke up with a headache. The head contains Ajan, the brow chakra, where the pineal glad is, the gland that regulates sleep and awake. It is also known as the third eye and indigo is its color. Maybe I haven’t been sleeping enough. The pineal gland is shaped like a pine cone. Maybe if I take a walk in the pine trees draped in indigo, my headache will go away.

There are three kinds of pine trees around my house: ponderosa, lodgepole, and sugar pine. Three, a fantastic number. The trinity – body, mind, and spirit. I need to seek unity within myself. But three is also a masculine number. Do I need to work on that? With Ben gone, there is a lot more work. I have to chop and stack the wood; I’m not complaining, it’s very Zen and the sweat releases toxins from my body. I am going to stop mowing the lawn, though. It’s symbolic of cutting off my personal growth. My neighbors might not like the look of long grass.

I went to my hairdresser today for the last time. It seems so silly now, to cut hair that will only grow back. It also represents a loss of power. Look what happened to Samson. And besides, it felt like her hands were too close to my brain. That bugs me. Does she realize that she works next to brains all day long? I wonder if I should bring it up. Something tells me no.

My horoscope this morning said not to spend money. But when I read a different horoscope this afternoon, it said to make an important purchase. I’m not sure what to do.

At my dance class, I started whirling and couldn’t stop. It was so liberating, to turn and turn and twirl and whirl, I couldn’t stop the motion if I had wanted to. It felt like a gift moving through me. The freedom of it made me so ecstatic and my energy so contagious that everyone stopped to watch.

I had to stop working for a while; fortunately, my boss agreed. I worked for the Title Company, and one day I looked at our letterhead, at the word Title, and it seemed like such a strange word. Just look at it: title. The letters involved just don’t convey its seriousness. But that’s not why I left. It wasn't the number’s fault, either, but sometimes a combination—22 + 22 = 44—was so wonderful that I laughed and forgot what I was doing and had to start over. I loved the look of the numbers, the red ink on the light green page, the columns in neat grids. But I couldn’t keep my pencils sharp enough; I sometimes had to grind them down to a stub to get a perfect point and then they were too small to comfortably hold. And I know the humming of the computer was causing a constant slight vertigo. I tried everything to get rid of the vertigo, including ear candles. I would stick an ear candle through a pie tin and set it on fire and let it burn until I felt the warm flame near my face. My boss really hated it when I did that.

The ear symbolically represents a spiral and spirals mean ascension. I am sure good things are coming my way; I have done nothing but good deeds lately, joyfully greeting people I don’t know. Karma, the son of the Hindu sun god Surya, was born from his mother’s ear. This means I need to listen, not only to outer sounds, but to my inner voice.

I had to drop my dance class. I think the other students were intimidated by my abandon.

Some days I don’t want to get out of bed. Even though it’s very firm, I am so happy to have found my toxin-free, prescription-only mattress. It took several weeks of research and interviews and it drove Ben crazy while we slept on the floor, but it was for his health, just like the flax seed breakfast shakes. I’m not sure he realizes how much I tried to help him. I gave Ben brain tests every night, like name ten uses for a paper clip in ten seconds. He’s with a woman now who wears make-up and perfume—she’s a real study in camouflage—and high heels that her vertebrae will regret. It’s hard to imagine her giving Ben a brain test. On late night walks, I’ve seen inside their house; they have a big screen TV, emitting who knows what and probably rewiring their brains. Sometimes I hide behind the lettuce bin at the supermarket and watch what he selects. I want to shout out, “Don’t eat the peaches!” because they have the highest pesticide load.

He does look happy, but I know it’s only to hide his pain. He’s too reliant on Google.

A “doctor” showed up yesterday, at least that’s what he called himself. He wore a black suit, but when he crossed his legs I noticed brown socks. I don’t know how they expect me to trust a man who wears brown socks with a black suit. Also, the particular shade of brown in his socks is the color of deception. He asks, “Why do you think you see meaning in everything?” I ask him, “What’s the alternative?”

On my walk today, I try to imagine that nothing means anything. That trees are just trees, big plants sticking straight out of the ground. But it’s impossible that they mean nothing. At the very least, they are homes for birds and insects and other creatures. They provide shade, and their music in the wind tells us what is coming. But I try. I walk up to an incense cedar and say: You mean nothing. But the tree smiles and I give it a hug.

Ben hasn’t called in six months. There are six sides to a cube. He’s an ice cube. The largest ice shelf in the world is the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica. It’s a piece of frozen water the size of France.

Sunset is probably the most challenging time of day for me. It comes down like a heavy blanket. The colors, of course, I experience to the fullest. They are shades of pink, the color of universal love. But after the pink is gone, it’s just me waiting for sunrise.

What is Avogadro’s number? I remember father telling me why I needed to know, but it escapes me now.

I don’t see the doctor anymore. We just didn’t connect. I felt like we were speaking two different languages. He couldn’t understand that I wouldn’t put man-made chemicals into my body and he wasn’t open to alternatives, like manifesting happiness. I have started marking my territory, a different spot each night all the way around the house, just in case he comes back.

I think my body is telling me something. If I can’t get up, maybe it means I shouldn’t get up. But I need to eat: the body is the temple of the soul. It takes 13 steps to get to the refrigerator—do all machines hum?—and we all know what they say about 13. It used to make me laugh in the elevator at work, how the floor we were really on was the 13th, but it was called the 14th. I would push the empty space between 12 and 14 every day in protest, sometimes missing my stop.

I eat a spoonful of wheat germ, but it’s very dry. The water from the tap is undoubtedly toxic, and I have no bottled water. It’s hard to find water bottled in glass, and I won’t eat or drink anything that touches plastic. People just don’t seem to realize that there are consequences with plastic.

I don’t think the phone is working. I have called and called and left messages for friends and family, sometimes several daily, and haven’t received one call back. I would call the phone company, but obviously I can’t. I come to realize the reason I am not making connection with anyone is a sign from the universe. I need to go within, to figure things out on my own.

There are no lights in my house anymore. It’s very strange, but it seems that every light bulb in the house went out at the same time the wiring stopped working. The good news is that all the machines have stopped humming, and the only sound I hear from my bed is the wind.

I am comforted by the sound of the wind along the side of my house, brushing off the detritus and making things fresh again. It is inconceivable to me that the wind is nothing more than argon and nitrogen … and some other things … that create an atmosphere. Wind is not properly honored. I think of Ben, letting the Doppler map on the computer decide if he would pick up an umbrella instead of just listening.

I will create a dance based on the Beaufort wind force scale. It will be my life’s work. I will incorporate the color of truth using white scarves, waving, to symbolize turbulence.

The sun is rising over the hills. Sun, it symbolizes…light…and some other things.

The wind has stopped. A chickadee sits outside my bedroom window, singing. Chickadees are the seekers of truth and knowledge. It is black and white and gray. Gray is a misunderstood color. Gray, in Czech, means “to see.”

I try to see, and I see clouds. Clouds mean something…it will come to me, what they mean.

Kim Wyatt is publisher of Bona Fide Books.