Noelie is home again, after her second separate weekend in the veterinary hospital. She’s eating on her own and she can sleep standing on one foot with her head tucked backward, which is more than I can do, so hey.

I didn’t know what was going to happen over this long holiday weekend. I feared the inevitable. Not too many parrots have been known to survive a stroke. I decided not to cancel my plans to go camping, so I could creep off to cry in the trees and meditate on all that circle of life business.

Time enough to find out the sad news after we came down off the mountain again. In the meantime, let me pretend that all this is uncertain. Schrodinger’s Parrot.

I set out alone to walk around the lake, a distance somewhere between seven and eight miles. This would be the farthest distance I have traveled on foot since I came down with COVID last year. Actually about double.

What I didn’t know, when I set out, was that there was not a clear path around the entire lake.

This is life. You make these big impressive plans and set out to accomplish them, often as a way to escape a situation or a grief or a trauma, and then realize that what you are doing isn’t what you thought it was going to be.

I walked over sand

I walked over rocks

I walked straight into a bog

My socks got wet

I didn’t know where I was

I couldn’t find the path

I wandered in the trees and realized the sun was going to set

I was in the home stretch, only a mile or so from camp, tired and dehydrated and feeling dumb as heck

When I turned around and decided to go back in the woods again

And I saw these rare flowers, trilliums, that supposedly take seven years to bloom

Oh, I should take a picture of these, I thought, and got out my phone

Only to see an incoming text message. Out here?

A video of my little parrot Noelle, standing at her dish and eating, which used to be the most ordinary thing in the world

But which now constituted PROOF OF LIFE

And I stood there in the Bog of Confusion and texted my husband and found out that she was home again.

A few minutes later I had found the trail - a messy and muddy trail, unimproved, large sections washed out in knee-deep pools of water, blocked by half a dozen fallen trees - and half an hour later I was back in camp

Where everyone thought I had been in my tent taking a nap the whole time.

I was not lost

I did not need a search party

I didn’t even get a mosquito bite, despite the bog

And I drank nearly two liters of water and ate two burgers

And told everybody about my sweet little birdie

And there was much rejoicing.

I thought to myself, if I can walk seven miles then maybe I can walk ten

Maybe I can run-walk soon

Only a year ago I could barely stand up long enough to fold a basket of laundry

And now I can carry a 30-pound pack down the stairs again.

I can pitch my tent, I can put my sleeping bag in the compression sack, I can survive a night when the temperature is 43F

I did it all

And if I can survive coronavirus, then maybe my baby bean can survive her stroke after all.

When I got back to town I talked to my husband and he shared about what he has learned from the vet. She has been checking in a lot.

We are now on the cutting edge of veterinary science

She only knows of one other parrot who has had the same symptoms as my girl

That bird was messed up for a few months

BUT IT RECOVERED

And she is not writing her off by any means!

Let’s remember her as an acrobat, chatty, musical, demanding little diva

And not as this sorry creature with dizzy spells who cannot preen her own tail.

Let us hope and pray together that she will recover, like this other bird supposedly has, that she will continue her upward trend and start to collect her personality back into herself.

Let us wish for her that she will have better balance and better strength and more appetite, that she will return to her cheerful little self

just like her mama did

And let’s also take a few moments to think about whatever the heck miracles might be.

I shared about Noelie’s story before going off grid for the weekend

Because my heart was heavy and I didn’t know how to do anything else

But also because I had this inkling that positive thoughts might work, and asking would be harmless.

I thought of all the many friends my little parrot has made, with her sweet nature and kisses and all the times she has posed for photos, the happiness she has distributed

I thought, if any of her many friends were to pause for a moment and think of her, let their hearts go out to her

Maybe there would be something to it?

It seems like probably there was!

I wanted everyone to know that whatever we have been doing together in this project, it seems to be working!

Now if you’re looking for a simple homework assignment, if you want to participate in this endeavor of willing my small bird back to health, this is the task:

Visualize her successfully grooming her lovely red tail and doing her bird yoga.

I will be home with her again soon - and my poor hubby as well, of course - and my visualization is holding her again. I know and trust that she will be there to greet me, that she has another week in her.

That she may be stronger and healthier in a week than she is today.

As may we all.

Can a book change your life? Does it matter whether you believe that a book can change your life or not? There is some serious magic going on in Jen Sincero’s books, and most likely in the lady herself. I pre-ordered You are a Badass Every Day and read it as soon as it came out. Let me share a couple of moments of magic involved in that relatively mundane event.

1. I was pre-ordering a different book, and I got an Amazon credit;
2. I looked at the books in that category, and found You are a Badass at Making Money, which I’ve already read but obviously needed on my tablet full-time;
3. The new book popped up in my recommendations, the first I had heard that it would soon exist;
4. I bought it and then promptly forgot about it;
5. Got the email reminder maybe two months later and read it in one sitting;
6. Looked at Sincero’s website while working on my review;
7. Saw that she will be appearing in person within walking distance of my apartment in just a few days, her only appearance in my state.

Kismet! Kismet, I tell you!

Also, I found a $20 bill a few feet outside my front door earlier today, just as I was thinking, “I’m finally going to upgrade my computer the first week of January.”

The thing about manifesting is that you can only really believe it works after you’ve experienced it in action. Otherwise it sounds kinda dumb. For those who know, this will be a delightful and very useful book to keep handy. For those who don’t know, um, it might be better to start with one of her other books. Which, I mean, you’re going to want to read them all anyway, obviously. There’s a reason why you keep seeing so many cool-looking people reading You are a Badass everywhere you go.

I loved this book. I loved it so much that it actually occurred to me to make some cross-stitch samplers out of some of my favorite quotes. As with her previous books, You are a Badass Every Day has sections that feel like they were written specifically for me, directed at my exact issues. I bookmarked the heck out of it. This is magnificent to do with a digital copy, because you can look at just your notes and bookmarks, and it’s like a custom manifesto!

There is so much in this book, so much in each of Jen Sincero’s books, that I feel all fluttery and wound up when I think about what I want to say. Maybe I’ll write a concordance, 800 pages that will finally organize my commentary. Until then, just read the book. You know you want to.

Favorite quotes:

An excuse is simply a challenge that you’ve decided has power over you.

When you succumb to fear, you are under the illusion that you can predict the future.

If you keep waiting for the right time, you’ll keep living the wrong life.

I love this book!

The premise of Write It Down Make It Happen is very simple: writing down clear, specific desires helps them to come true. This is sorta ludicrous on the face of it, isn’t it? Yet Klauser begins by offering several examples of famous people who did it, including Suze Orman, Scott Adams, and Jim Carrey. I do it myself, as I have done on a regular basis for many years, and that’s why I’m always looking for ways to improve my process. What I love about Write It Down Make It Happen is that it focuses on getting more analytical about the wish-formation and writing part of the process, rather than just the yearning part. Writing down what you want is a way of figuring out what you want and planning how to make it happen.

Chapters focus on different areas where someone might want to manifest something. One of my favorites is the chapter “Getting Ready to Receive,” in which a lonely older woman writes diary entries to her future soul mate as though he already existed in her life. I did something similar before dating my current husband. I did intensive journaling exercises to make sense out of my divorce, work through everything I didn’t want, decide whether I was even interested in a long-term monogamous relationship, and figure out what emotional context I wanted if I ever got married again. Without all of that writing, which took hundreds of pages, I know I would not have recognized my husband as an eligible partner. It’s about recognizing how you want to feel while you’re with your partner, not how tall he is or what music he likes.

Write It Down Make It Happen advises that we write about our anger, fear, and resistance around a situation as well as our wishes and positive feelings. This is so hugely important! We are reminded that our understanding of a situation may be incomplete, and that we often assume something can’t go our way without actually asking about it. There’s a really excellent example in the book about a woman who wishes to live in Europe and thinks she’ll have to make a difficult career trade-off. She is astonished to learn that her wish is a win-win for her employer, too. Living a bigger life means contributing at a higher level, and that means giving more to others and the world than you would by staying unhappily stuck.

Write It Down Make It Happen is a classic example of why wishes deserve to come true. Henriette Anne Klauser undoubtedly wrote down her wishes that she could write this book, that it would find a publisher, and that readers would enjoy it. While she wished for these things for herself, what she was really doing was propelling herself to create something more valuable to others than it was to herself. Now we can only wish that she’ll write another one!

Favorite quote:

“Writing a full-fledged description of what you want is one way of saying you believe that it’s attainable and you are ready to receive it.”