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Jennie Marlow

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A Lesson in Coexistence & Conflict Resolution…with a Bird?

June 21, 2014 By Jennie Marlow Leave a Comment

Our cabin on this mountain is rather small, so it’s our shed which houses the washer, dryer and the chest freezer. Normally, I keep the shed window shut against all manner of local rodents, but during the last heat wave, one night when a cool breeze finally came through, it seemed best to risk an incursion by mice, wood rats and voles to cool the place down.

Honestly, this window isn’t something I relish touching. It’s opaque with many seasons of unwashed grime, and there are quite a lot of cobwebs around the latch. (It’s apparently a nifty place to anchor a spider’s web.) So, when I open this window, I pay strict attention. I can’t help but inspect the area before I tackle the task of undoing the latch and scrapping the pane against the detritus that has collected in the channel in which the window is supposed to glide.

So, you can imagine my surprise when I reentered the shed at dawn the following morning, only to find that a tiny fly-catcher bird had apparently spent the night building a very exquisite little nest from bits of moss, leaves, weed straws, and shreds from a long discarded lizard skin.

And just then we startled each other, the would-be mother and I. She was about to fly into the open window, and she let out a shrill chirp when she saw me sanding there, hovering over her nest. Of course, I left the shed immediately, then watched and waited at my bedroom window, hoping she would come back and reclaim her nest, but she didn’t return.

Even so, I didn’t have the heart to close the window. The nest is, well…nestled so cozily on the sill against the casing. This little exquisiteness of the mother bird’s “mistake” was now my daily pleasure, and no less a masterpiece for having been built in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Then one morning, when I entered the shed, she was on the nest, flying out of the open window the moment I appeared. And there they were, four tiny speckled brown eggs!

My first reaction was to chart an absurdly impractical plan to never enter the shed again until her babies were fledged and out of the nest. My husband, a country boy born and bred, shook his head and said firmly, “You’re talking 14 weeks! No, she chose the spot. Now she’ll have to share the shed with us.”

It wasn’t lost on me that my first reaction was to sabotage my own peace to spare the bird discomfort. (Hmm…that sounded pretty familiar…) Frankly, it never occurred to me that she and I could work out some sort of mutual accommodation. She was a creature of Nature, and I, a blundering human, was trashing her plans for a family! (My husband will roll his eyes when he reads this.)

The bird and I have been at this for about a week now, and she is managing quite well with the daily incursions of humans. She doesn’t leave when we come into the shed, unless we need to get right next to the nest. And if she leaves, she’s back within seconds of our departure.

We’re actually coexisting pretty well, I’d say. (Okay, I admit I haven’t yet tested the robustness our détente with a rumbling load of clothes on the spin cycle yet.) And I’ve even been rethinking my original opinion that the nest was built in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Frankly, I needed this. It’s an excellent lesson that will forever inform the way I deal with conflict, especially when I am tempted to assume that it can’t be worked out or that the other can’t do what it would take.

And it’s also just so heartwarming to think that if she is as successful as she is determined, I will likely have a bird’s eye view, from the bedroom window, into the care and feeding of the hatchlings, which would be such an enormous privilege.

Hear me sigh with delight.

Filed Under: Creativity, Life Tagged With: Conflict resolution, Guilt, Trust

What a Coyote Taught Me About Growth and Evolution

June 1, 2014 By Jennie Marlow Leave a Comment

It’s been quite a while since my last post. I had intended to keep up a rhythm with posting, but the past few weeks have been incredibly busy ones, and before I knew it, the month had evaporated.

I’ve been working on From Solo to Soulmate, a program I’m launching soon, and wrapping up my book on the subject has been all-consuming.

The amount of work needed to get a project like this one up and running is always surprising, and like all of our labors to build something new, there are no guarantees that it will be successful. For some reason, I haven’t fretted much about failing this time. I guess you could say I’ve grown up a bit during the maelstrom of the last couple of years.

Last night, my husband spotted a coyote very close to our cabin, and we were able to watch him for quite a while as he explored the field behind us. Such encounters are rare here, although we do hear coyotes at night from time to time, especially in summer.

At one point, the coyote stopped and looked me right in the eye for almost half a minute. It was startling enough that I asked one of my guides, Spotted Eagle, about it.

He told me that Coyote represents both the creator and the jokester.

He said the thing to keep in mind about Coyote “medicine” is that it often fails to produce the result we expected. However, in failing, it always serves a much greater purpose. Coyote offers wisdom that is hidden from us, unless we fully accept what didn’t work out the way we expected. Only through acceptance are we granted access to the wisdom available from the apparent failure. He said the keys to coyote medicine are adaptability, simplicity and trust. It is Coyote who reminds us that wisdom and failure are inextricably linked in the sacred paradox that is our fulfillment.

This encounter and the teaching that followed it gave me pause to reconsider how I view all of the so-called failures that punctuate my past.

I was reminded of something Spotted Eagle loves to say: that a good education is expensive, and failure is usually the engine that drives our evolution in the direction of our eventual success.

It’s only human to resist the pain of failure. Perhaps Coyote can teach us to resist a little less so we can mine the wisdom present in all of the many things that did not turn out the way we expected or wanted.

Filed Under: Life Tagged With: Acceptance, Awareness, Painful emotions, Spotted Eagle, Trust

What is a Vision?

June 24, 2013 By Jennie Marlow Leave a Comment

“An imaginary picture of a future outcome is not a vision; it is a fantasy, an illusion, and a very seductive one. It causes us to believe in the futures we conjure in the imagination. This is not vision. Vision is not about envisioning the future. Vision does not foretell; it does not predict the form the future will take or what the outcome of an endeavor will be. Vision is not a fantasy of an event or circumstances we can picture in our imagination. Vision is none of these things. It is not empowered by what we hope will happen in future time. Vision refers, not to fantasy we make up in the imagination, but instead to the manner in which something is seen.”

— Spotted Eagle

Vision is a very misunderstood concept in Western Culture where it seems to be confused with imagining a future result. There is a visualization method which has received a lot of attention in recent years. This method is based on a premise that, in order to create what we want, we must picture ourselves having that thing “manifested.” We must imagine the form we want the future will take, and this clear picture of the outcome then becomes the basis of a goal for achieving that outcome, often by some arbitrary date made up in the Mind. In some models, absolute belief that the outcome will come about is also required.

Belief has the unfortunate tendency to blind us to uncomfortable truths, especially to the uncertainties which are the part of every now-moment. While it is true that visionaries see potentials that others do not see, their belief is not invested in medicating their insecurities and anxiety. Perhaps this can be understood clearly when we examine what we mean when we call someone a visionary. Think of great artists and inventors, like Leonardo da Vinci and Thomas Edison. Consider great thinkers and social reformers, like Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Clara Barton, and Sylvia and Emily Pankhurst. Call to mind the great resisters of tyranny, like Harriett Tubman, Frederick Douglas, Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela. And finally, reflect upon the great theoretical scientists, like Albert Einstein and Steven Hawking. What can we notice about this small list of visionary thinkers? Were they engaged in fantasies about the future? Not really.

Instead, these visionaries saw their present-time world quite differently than did most people of their time. They possessed extraordinary insight and discernment. They were able to move beyond the frame of reference of their time and access a way of perceiving that propelled their awareness beyond the boundaries of then-current thinking. Through their creative lens, these visionaries saw real and tangible potentials whose actualization created enormous shifts for all of humanity. Their visions had one important thing in common: clarity about the meaning and purpose of their efforts. Their unique perspective allowed them to conceive of something which did not yet exist, and at the same time, they were aware of certain obstacles and limitations in the scope of their vision and what they themselves might be able to achieve by sharing their unique perspective.

In Part Two – Vision, Limitation & Uncertainty Spotted Eagle discusses how limitation and uncertainty serve our creative vision.

Filed Under: Creativity Tagged With: Essence, Present moment, Spotted Eagle, Trust, Vision

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