For a few years, I had a very special bluebird who always did the strangest thing in April.
We have many bluebirds near our home, but this one was different. He visited me.
He would move between my windows and my glass door, hitting his beak on the glass. Bump, bump, and tap, tap.
He was a beautiful, if noisy, reminder that spring had arrived in all its beauty and to remind me that all things rejuvenate.
Sometimes we forget what needs to be done in order to receive the full benefits of rejuvenation.
Late in the fall, I do some apparently brutal things to my garden. I chop the stems of many of the plants left in the garden down to the ground.
If you listen in, you will hear me talking to the plants.
“I’m sorry for doing this, but really, I am doing you a favor. I am making it possible for you to stop trying to take care of greenery that will die soon, anyway. This way, you can put all your energy into going deep within and preparing for your finest display ever next spring.”
In the spring, as the bluebird tapped on my window, I imagined him saying, “Come out and see the results of letting go, so growth can happen with more abundance.”
Spring in my kitchen!
It happens fast. One day, everything will be brown. The next day, there buds on trees and green tips peeking up everywhere.
If we lived in a Disney film, I can imagine that bluebird flying through all our houses and lives, pointing out what is no longer necessary, what takes up space, what takes up time, and what takes up energy so that we can eliminate them, making room for growth.
In the spring, we call it spring cleaning.
We get the urge to wash the windows, shake out the rugs, and clean out our closets. In the garden, we rake out leaves left from the winter and add fertilizer and mulch to help the fresh growth.
All of this is beautifully symbolic because a lasting and impactful spring cleaning begins with a mental belief cleaning.
What beliefs can we eliminate that no longer serve us, knowing that what we believe, think, or perceive is what we see and experience? Perceptions filter what we experience.
So, what beliefs can we polish so that more light shines through?
What ideas can be fertilized with an influx of attention and nurtured with a higher understanding of what is True?
Because here is the part that is important to remember. What we see and experience with our human senses is a front for what lies within.
Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Living With A Wild God, said, “I was just staring at the woods … [when] something happened. It’s like a layer peeled off the world, the layer that contains all the meanings, the words, the language, the associations we have. Yeah, I was looking at trees, but I no longer could say I knew exactly what a tree was, with all the knowledge and experience that goes into our notion of a tree.”
It is not our thoughts that create or govern the universe. It is not our thoughts that make things happen for the good, nor do our thoughts cause evil.
Our thoughts and beliefs do only one thing: they filter.
As we accept that there is much more to everything than what meets the eyes, or reported by our senses, the filter becomes more open, and we see beyond the symbol and into the essence of Life.
Sometimes that awareness pops into our lives when we least expect it.
In the middle of mulching the garden, I paused and looked at the daffodil that was inches from my nose as I remembered what Barbara Ehrenreich said and experienced the daffodil completely differently, along with everything else, for a moment.
Just for a moment. But a moment is enough to prove to ourselves that it is a divine Intelligence that is doing the thinking, and what It is thinking is Life itself.
Divine Intelligence is the force and substance behind all that we experience. It creates, runs, designs, and develops all that exists.
And if what we experience doesn’t appear to be good, it is not the thought of divine Intelligence, it is a filter, a belief, a perception that is hiding from us what is really going on.
Although I no longer have the bluebird pecking at my window every day,. I remember what he was telling me.
That spring cleaning is really belief cleaning, and with the peeling away of beliefs, we can get a glimpse of the Life that is present behind the stage set.
BECA LEWIS coaches, teaches, writes blogs and books, plays with art, and is addicted to reading. She lives in Ohio with her husband and has kids and grandkids scattered across the country.
