Last week I wrote about my path crossings with Hummingbird, tiny winged reminders to pause during the day (a helpful tool for a caregiver who tends to focus on others). While I was receiving those messages from the animal kingdom, I was getting other, more startling wake-up calls from the material world as well.

A couple of monthls ago I returned from an overnight trip to visit my dad with a box full of old canning jars—the type with the wire bail and glass tops. A quick Internet search told me that one of the smaller jars, with unfamiliar wording and beautiful sky-blue coloring, was most likely from the late 1800s (and probably used by my grandparents to preserve the yields from their gardens). I’m sure my mom had these stashed away somewhere. My husband and I enjoy antiques so I couldn’t wait to clean it up and display it in our farmhouse kitchen.

Something sticky was pooled at the bottom of the jar, so I ran the water as hot as I could to let it soak. As I brought the jar under the stream of water, three things happened nearly simultaneously: I thought about how I had never broken anything in our stury vintage cast-iron sink, the jar slipped from my fingers, and I plunged my hands into the basin to catch it … quite unsucessfully.

It took elevation, a lot of pressure and many deep breaths before I could confirm that my pinky would stop bleeding long enough for me to bandage it. The jar, unfortunately, was not so lucky. I was heartbroken, but I took heed of the message that I shouted to myself as I cradled my hand and stared at the sink full of cerulean glass: “It wasn’t meant to be! It wasn’t meant to be!”

That event in itself was unusual. I rarely drop and break things, and I am far more likely to collect a poison ivy rash than a laceration on any given day. So I did think about the message this accident had for me … even before the next one happened.

Less than a week later, my little finger still sporting an adhesive bandage—I was hauling my large banana plant to its spot on our front porch for its summer vacation (houseplants love being outside in fair weather, if you can manage toting them around). I have terracotta plant waterers in some of my large plants, and this one was topped with an unusually shaped clear antique bottle—something my mom had passed down to me years prior. I thought about removing it for the trip to the porch, telling myself that I might break it, but I tamped down those feelings, keeping my head low and gaze narrowed as I quickly carried the plant through the house. I made it all the way to the mud room, mere feet from my final destination, before the bottle toppled onto the mud room floor. I laughed as I looked at the shards of glass strewn across the bricks—it couldn’t have happened twice. Or three times …

A few days after that I was packing up items to bring to our local second-hand store. As I headed toward the outside spigot to rinse off a dusty plant pot—one that matched another my mom has—I mentally shook my head and smiled as my grip tightened. Not again, I thought … until the pot slipped onto the driveway, separating into three large pieces.

I hold dishes, glasses and other breakables several times a day—when I eat from them, clean them etc.—but it was only during these three incidents that I thought about what I was doing (and, as the breakage piled up, what might happen). I’m not clumsy by nature, so I knew there had to be something more to this pattern.

I once again turned to spiritual coach Tawnia Converse for her take. “Breakdown to break through” was the gist of what she said, referencing what was going on astrologically and collectively. Did I need to get my own attention to snap out of something and move forward?

I believe that my mom communicates with me occasionally—the glasses in our china cupboard seem to tinkle coincidentally on certain occasions, for example. Each of the items I dropped had a connection to her, so perhaps she was the one trying to get me to notice something.

Tawnia said that patterns don’t always resolve themselves right away—it might take time. But as Brene Brown says in Gifts of Imperfection, once you see a pattern, you can’t unsee it. And I was reminded of that several weeks later when I stepped on what I thought was a little pebble as I padded around my kitchen barefoot. I was unsuccessful at kicking it away, so I reached down to brush it off … and found a tiny shard of glass embedded in the ball of my foot.

OK, OK, I’m listening!

Social image hoto by Umberto on Unsplash