Getting a red light

My New Book


Walked out to the cabin this morning. Granted, I had my down coat on at the time, but it felt nearly balmy. I’ve been wondering what the new red light has been down the way, assuming it to be a temporary light for the construction or from the equipment along the freeway ramp. This morning I realized it’s the cause of the construction. The newly installed traffic light glares boldly into my woods. I can see it from the house. The whole time the ramp work has been going on, I knew they were changing the traffic signal from a stop sign to stop and go lights…and still…when the light showed up in my woods it was a shocker. I hadn’t thought I’d see it. Hadn’t imagined how high it would be. Hadn’t imagined it peaking over my fence. The ramp isn’t open yet and the light is permanently set to red at the moment. Soon it will be an ever-changing range of red, yellow, green. Pooh.

I’ve been having technical difficulties lately. They started with my e-mail. I was preparing to send an announcement of The Given Self to my email list, which let me tell you, is not an organized list. When I want to send an email to someone I haven’t heard from in a while, I do a find for their name and respond to their last email to me. The lists I have in my address book are pretty old. Regardless, I was getting queasy about this from the get-go. I hate getting group emails and didn’t want to send one. I’d already decided to write one letter and send it to each individually. I’d sent it to about three people – well not “it” – but I’d mailed a personalized version of it (so personalized that it made the letter senseless) to those few, when my email went down. It’s probably recoverable, but not by me. So, if anyone’s reading this who once emailed me and would like me to have their address again sometime soon, send me a note.

I’m still surprised when technical difficulties arise to enforce an intuition. Still surprised even though it’s happened many times. More times than I can remember. Some would probably say these are flukes. Others that they’re the effect of my inner life reaching out and causing effect in my outer life. I’m beginning to believe the latter. I’m beginning to believe things happen on purpose. I’m beginning to believe things happen on purpose when I’m not intending them to…that the random isn’t random and the purposeful is contrived. It’s a variation on a theme I’ve been exploring for a while.

A cool thing happened yesterday to reinforce the original intuition if not the theme. I’d told a friend about all this and she sent me a “group” email she’d just received. It was well intended but awful. Simply awful. Who wants to get those things? Enough said.

But it’s kind of like the darn traffic signal. You think you know what will happen and then suddenly you’ve got a red light.