Two, maybe three weeks passed. I was again at the work place
mentioned in the previous breadcrumb about the
Vision picture. Things were not exactly
"better," but I had gained a bit of perspective from the
vision experience and was placing my psychological marbles into the
"other 99%" of my work performance. Can't say I was
feeling exactly smug, but certainly more confident. First and
last, this is a spiritual journey, another gem that got my attention
once more in the earlier event. And there is nowhere, no darkest
corner even, that Spirit is not.
Something not unusual, but not everyday happened: The UPS guy
arrived. He handed me this item:
Now,
considering the tale just told ["She had a vision. We helped
her build her site"], you 
may not be surprised that
this item instantly brought to mind the bank container in the advert
in that story -- with a few !!!s and a couple of ??s. Did
you get that when you saw this, too?
The fellow
who walked in with it added a slightly gilded touch to the moment.
I had seen him almost daily at another [temp.] job situation just before
I started here. Both places were evidently on his route, and I had
seen him here a few times the year before. But another delivery
fellow started showing up with the packages, and the last time I
remember seeing -- let's call him "Kevin" -- was around Christmas [this was
now August].
Curiously, Kevin had left an indelible impression on me from the very first time
I saw him. He just looked so .. well .. angelic! And it was
always a delight to see him, and he always seemed to remember my name. So my mind is slightly spinning in
neutral -- not thinking absolutely anything weird [woo-woo stuff], but
from 20/20 hindsight, on some level I felt the hairs were standing up on
the back of my neck and arms again.
I watched him leave before seeing who I should give this to. It
was addressed to [not her real name] "Madeleine," the person who was perhaps most responsible for
founding this hospice organization more
than 25 years prior to this moment.
Interestingly, the day I showed up for their formal orientation
process was the last orientation in which this person would be
participating. She was about to move to another
city. That has stuck with me too, because meeting her then gave me
the opportunity to verify that two of my relatives, now deceased, were
also involved in helping bring this organization into being those many
years ago.
One of the nurses was passing through and I mentioned this package
addressed to Madeleine -- to a flagrantly wrong department,
wrong building, with our building's street address. [A
thought: if the package had gone to the right building, I would
never have imagined this little adventure. But I don't believe it
was supposed to go to the 'right' building!] But this nurse realized instantly something I
hadn't seen yet, that it was obviously junk mail from Sprint -- sent
UPS! She saw my surprise and said, "You'd be amazed how
companies actively pursue medical professionals."
UPS??! I noticed it weighed one pound. Imagine! This
takes 'junk mail' to whole other dimensions in terms of invested [I call
it gambling] costs and, let's face it, trash -- more wasted trees, more
plastic, etc. Don'tcha wonder what success might mean to and
beyond getting costs met for a venture like this?
Back to Madeleine and Kevin. Each of them was a significant person
from my past. Madeleine connected me to my deceased family members
... and reverberations and remote rumblings of the Ford
dealership adventure. And Kevin was .. well, let's just
say he beautifully looked and played the part of an angelic presence who
always made me smile. Suddenly, U.P.S. took on more of an UPs
connotation -- appropriate to his role in my life. Hmmm.. things
were starting to come together with "that glow," but why today
when everything seemed to be progressing without any threatening monkey
wrenches flying through the air? I need to
"sprint"? Why right this moment?
I was about to find out. Just a little while later, I got word from a supervisor that I may have been
responsible for something that went badly askew during a public event
that had been held the night before. We had been planning and
working on it for several weeks, and I came in feeling very good about
what we had done and had already heard from 3-4 people who had been
there that it was terrific, although it hadn't gone 'quite' as smoothly as
the essentially same program that had been given the week before.
To hear my supervisor tell about it, however, eventually had me
wondering about the return of the I'm-gonna-get-you 'monkey wrenches'
that have been so noticeable lately. Maybe my life was so out on a
limb it really took that level of red flag to get my undivided
attention. I had shut down to the bare bones of survival mode the
last couple of years, trying to get this web project to fly with few
resources and far too little to consider my life otherwise
functional. Classic case of the more I lived with this felt
desperation, the more my life reflected exactly this -- desperation!
That's when "Sprint!" really got my attention. On some
level this felt to be somebody's fantastic creativity and sense of
humor. Again, I was reminded of grades and shades of the Ford
Dealership day that had had a similar feel to it in which it seemed as
though there was a whole roomful of relations in the spirit world trying
to give me every encouragement -- with something bordering on
glee. I mean it really is funny to me! The kind of funny
that is delight -- they are soooo magnificently inventive and
resourceful!
On a more serious side, "Sprint" suggested to me, it's time to
make some bids for partnership -- NOW! Don't wait, don't hesitate
-- just DO IT! And on the other side of the coin, I would soon be
considering that maybe it's time to give up this job. That's part
of what I was hearing. It was getting edgy, and I did not know how
to make it better. Even trying harder didn't seem to be getting me
anywhere.
So an 'angel', at least several relations on the Other Side, and my
conscience, my already over-the-edge life, as well as a painful longing
for a new life in the company of others who LOVE this work, all added up
to making sense of S P R I N T. Remember the scene in
one of the Carlos Castaneda books in which Don Juan Maatus took his protégées
to a mesa or mountaintop in the middle of the night and had them run
over the edge, full-tilt-harry?? And Carlos just knew he was a
dead man ...
And another mythic tale: Come to the edge, he said, and fly!
And they flew!
The darnedest part about that leap is until you are flat out beyond any
hope of catching yourself as you fall away into the dark abyss, you can
never, never know if you're gonna have the wings of a soaring eagle or a
fried turkey.
.. Gulp. Looks like I'm about to find
out.
