“But sometimes—rarely, but magnificently—there comes a day when you’re open and relaxed enough to actually receive something. Your defenses might slacken and your anxieties might ease, and then magic can slip through. The idea, sensing your openness, will start to do its work on you. It will send the universal physical and emotional signals if inspiration (the chills up the arms, the hair standing up on the back of the neck, the nervous stomach, the buzzy thoughts, that feeling of falling into love or obsession). The idea will organize coincidences and portents to tumble across your path, to keep your interest keen. You will start to notice all sorts of signs pointing you toward the idea. Everything you see and touch and do will remind you of the idea. The idea will wake you up in the middle of the night and distract you from your everyday routine. The idea will not leave you alone until it has your fullest attention.
And then, in a quiet moment, it will ask, “Do you want to work with me?”—Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic
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They walked together amongst the trees, barren and open limbed beneath high silver winter sun. Verdure of the understory, flush in growth of grass in fall of the autumn leaves and opening again to sky, held heavy in dew from melt of the morning frost.
Together they walked, no fixed trail, amongst the open woods. She dressed in sweater of yellow-green, like October’s begin when the yellows first show brightening and enlivening the fade of summer’s green. She was beautiful in the hue.
They walked in silence, neither minding, content to be together, in meander of bodily presence as minds went to where they willed.
They came to a tree with course gray bark, limbs bare of leaves but adorned with opened husks silhouetted before blue sky. On the ground, they gathered nuts, tan with dark black stripes, which they would crack and eat in reside of home and warmth of hearth.
A thought was on his mind, its form becoming clear as when one looks into a stream, seeing the slight and subtle details through the pristine water and, to one’s surprise, where what seems as only pebbled floor, rainbow flash, and trout appears.
Minds too have their rivers. Minds too have their hides, their lives and treasures hidden in their runs, appearing, catchable, when one stills and attunes and sees.
Woods, escape—quiet places—they always helped him still.
He looked to her in awe-spirit amongst the open; yellow-green, even as spun wool, brilliant in the light.
Maybe he would write her.
Maybe she would write him.
He didn’t know, but he wondered.
Not wanting to break the moment, bring sound where none was needed, he waited a while longer.
Sensing, reading, in way she always seemed to know, she asked, “What do you want to say?”
Deferring, resorting first to compliment, he spoke, “That you’re beautiful in that hue.”
She smiled, words accent to sun in radiance of bright, sweater’s hue, sky in blue, and the mirth of her in gleam. In the smile, she waited, knowing there was more.
“I was thinking too, going back in time, past seasons that I lived. I went back to old writings, mind moments saved in words, and was surprised. Do you ever feel life cycle back, a mood of state of spirit in past returned and repeated in present—same timeline, same cycle to sun and stars?
I looked back to where I was, years to the day. I found passage of a book I was reading then and a story I wrote from. The story wasn’t great. I didn’t edit it. I usually don’t, and it was course and plainly a mind-flow write; but the beginning passage hit and spoke today just as it hit me then. I wrote a story almost exact the one of that day, only lead and actions of the two characters reversed.
I read a passage yesterday, it said: ‘The journey you are on is not random, it’s meant and designed for you. Every detail in your life connects with everything else and there is always a purpose to everything. Don’t get discouraged, but pay more attention to signs. All that you need to know is already there to guide you.’
Maybe I felt guided, am paying greater attention to cycles, patterns, and signs; but the date of story and passage hit me. They made me curious in wonder.”
“And what do you wonder?”
A quiet moment, find of the courage and words, he asked as the passage wrote.
“Do you want to work with me? Create and share ideas? Make Big Magic as stories told, given life by written form, spells of a very common sense?”
Chills ran up her arms. Hair rose on her back of neck. Nervous stomach and buzzy thoughts, feeling of falling into love or obsession, her struck by universal’s signs.
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