Wishing

I'm reading Noelle Oxenhandler's The Wishing Year: a good, cynical, intellectually rigorous book on making wishes. It's a great combination. There are many sentences and passages that I want to hold onto and many places that I think, yep, that's how I feel.

The feeling that you shouldn't ask for too much or be too happy because then the boom will get lowered, the other shoe will drop, and things will go bad. The intellectual suspicion of coincidences that are neat and fortuitous. The impatience with flabby New Age writing which wants to tie everything in life into a neat, happy, healing bundle.

So what does it mean if this morning, when I had the seven millionth idea about an idea for a yoga therapy business, that when I Googled it, that the first hit was my blog? It's a post from 2006 and it does not even mention the words that I Googled. (See, I'm not going to say the name yet because it might bring on a curse or bad luck....) It does offer up a feeling that was driven home by my time in India: as a country, we need to do a much better job of accepting and welcoming those who are different from us.

And the post before the one that came up as a hit? A poem by Mary Oliver. On New Year's eve, we had dinner at the house of one of my yoga students. As we were playing Scrabble after dinner and exchanging presents, I mentioned, upon seeing some one's gift of a Mary Oliver book, that I hadn't read her. I was told that I needed to and that I would like her writing.

Apparently, I already had, but would not have remembered if I hadn't followed the path from the words that I was searching the Internet for. Which brought me back to my homepage.

Discuss amongst yourselves. I have no idea what to make of this.

Comments

Steph said…
Hello Janet, I wanted to say happy new year to you! I followed your indian adventures .. I enjoyed them !
Janet said…
good to hear from you - I came across your presents the other day - how goes the art business?
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