A Cardinal Reminder...

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Finishing up my morning marketing for my businesses I decided to start my day - mind you its noon now so more like starting my afternoon.  But when you have life with a toddler and run two businesses from home and myriad side projects its a rather frequent occurrence.

I do tend to overload myself, but I think of it as ambition.  Really that's just an excuse, it's not ambition it's a nervous drive to feel like enough so it gets expressed in the doing of more externally to fill an internal gap (Share that on Twitter!)  On the other hand I'm just lousy with time management sometimes and anyone who tries to do "everything" is bound to get behind sooner or later.

But back to the issue at hand.  So I start my day, finally wrestling the small human from my lap I notice a stitch in my side from leaning in my chair.  I notice looking back my temper has been fraying all morning as I've raised my voice much more than I would prefer.  Add to that the fact that while I spent an hour and a half "checking in" with my social media, replying back to messages and the like I really feel like I haven't done any work.  I didn't have anything pressing to reply to - in fact only one message easily answered and that was it.

What I term "real work" is physically working on something, creating a new offering, major edits to my websites, or filing.  Things like that.  But anything that expresses energy over time is work technically speaking.

So in an effort to drive away the doldrums that were threatening my threshold I brought in the light to the apartment.  I could immediately feel my mood lift a bit having more light in my space.  Which is proven to help depression by the way.

You can see the contrast of how dark it is - I didn't use a flash at all.

As I go to open the other window I see a happy little male cardinal hanging out by my car.  I paused to watch him, being still so not to disturb him but became interrupted as I heard the sounds of my nearly 2 year old attempting to play on my computer...EEEK!

After removing him from my desk and ensuring he didn't bring on a blue screen of death with his efforts I recall my cardinal friend and remember I'd just charged by camera's batteries the day before.  Sadly I was too late to capture him.  But his presence still gave me pause.

I just missed him, but Mr. Cardinal was here...

With their brilliant red bodies Cardinals are a perfect representation of the energy of fire.  But being birds they relate to the connection of Air (through their flight, being messengers for Spirit, especially their feathers) and Earth (representing the Root Chakra which is also related to red, and in their nesting).  What makes me laugh is that of the four elements Water, which is left out here, is also the one I connect with the least.  Usually I attribute this fact that the Water energy is strong enough within my personality through my Sun Sign that I just don't need anymore Water.

But one of the things I've been missing today has been a sense of flow.  Water flows.  The others, not so much.  Instead I've been blundering (Earth), blustering (Air), or just plain pushing (Fire) through my day.  Cardinal served as a messenger of the energy that was dominating my presence and then as soon as I went to look more closely at it he was gone.  More flow.

When you fight against the natural energy of your life you meet resistance.  And as Wayne Dyer says, "what we resists persists".  So for me that means going with the flow more, if I can't do something exactly when and how I'd like to but could do it later I should.  What about you?  What energies are you resisting in your life?  How would your days go if you weren't "fighting" with yourself?  Tell me your take in the comments below!