When "outer" incidents reflect and offer lessons about the inner life, I am grateful. Some times, I am also quite surprised by how creatively messages are delivered. Here's an example:

For three days straight a robin has been returning to my sky blue Toyota and leaving abundant (less than pleasant) evidence of its presence. I have shooed the robin, cleaned the driver side door, mirror and window of bird droppings, even went to a carwash--so covered was the car--only to have the robin return and make its mark(s). 

I live in a town of long time farmers. Yesterday at the landfill, I asked an old farmer if he had any experience with this sort of behavior, wondering if he would look at me dubiously like I was imagining the whole thing.  Instead he smiled and said: "He's fighting with himself."

My turn to look at home dubiously: "Fighting with himself?" I replied, not sure I had heard him right.

"Yep, he sees himself in the mirror and doesn't know it's him. He's fighting himself thinking it's a different bird."

Now back to small miracles. The minute the farmer explained, I knew there was a reflection in this of something going on within me. 

I have been fighting myself for a few weeks now. Scared by what I think I see in the mirror, I have been resisting. I have gotten riled, ruffled my feathers, and felt cornered by illusion mistaken for truth.  Without getting into content for now: suffice it to say that I have been making a mental fuss about what I imagine I am seeing. I have been fighting a projected "enemy," in the form of (imagined) unwanted circumstances.  My resistance has been making a mess. I clean it up with meditation and then before I know it, I am perched staring into that mirror afraid of what I see.  

So now to contemplate my options. Not in terms of what to do about "the enemy," but rather how to see the truth of who i am clearly. 

This below from Women Food and God by Geneen Roth: "When I am willing to question and therefore feel whatever is there--terror, hatred, anger--with curiosity, the feelings relax, because they are met with kindness and openness instead of resistance and rejection..."

"Recurrent negative feelings--those that loop in the same cycles again and again without changing--are unmet knots of our past that get frozen in time for the precise reason that they were not met with kindness or acceptance."

"Can you imagine how you life would have been different if each time you were feeling sad or angry as a kid an adult said to you, 'Come here, sweetheart, tell me all about it.' If when you were overcome with grief at your best friend's rejection, someone said to you, 'Oh darling, tell me more. Tell me where you feel those feelings. Tell me how your belly feels, your chest. I want to know every little thing. I'm here to listen to you, hold you, be with you.'"

"All any feeling wants is to be welcomed with tenderness. It wants room to unfold. It wants to relax and tell it's story. It wants to dissolve like a thousand writhing snakes that with a flick of kindness become harmless strands of rope."