Vachon Imagined

My mother lives beside a farm, which means all kinds of critters find their way into her yard. Recently, a mockingbird was making an incredible racket. It wouldn’t stop. Most people would have dismissed it as noise, but my mother paid attention. Looking out the window, she discovered a black snake moving through the yard.

The bird wasn’t creating a problem. It was responding to one.

Being in our bodies is much the same. We are given warnings constantly. Tension. Anxiety. Anger. Resentment. Exhaustion. These signals arise the way the mockingbird’s call arose, pointing toward something that requires attention.

Yet many of us have learned to look outward rather than inward. We hear the warning and immediately search for someone to blame. The bitter person tries to change the person they perceive as bitter. The angry person lectures anger. The fearful person attempts to control what they fear.

The process becomes a constant exchange of identities, a back-and-forth of giving and receiving what we ourselves are carrying.

Until someone elevates.

Elevation is often misunderstood as becoming something more. In reality, it may be a return. A gradual returning to what exists beneath the conditioning, beneath the stories, beneath the identity we have spent years defending.

It happens incrementally. One moment of awareness at a time. One willingness to listen at a time.

Like my mother listening to the mockingbird.

The warnings are always there.

Yet we become captivated by the noise. We hurry toward conclusions, blame what is outside us, and project onto the world what is stirring within us.

In our rush to explain the warning, we miss what it is pointing toward.

Neither the bird nor the snake was the problem. One was calling, the other was simply being what it was.

Life often unfolds the same way. Thoughts, emotions, and sensations arise, not as enemies, but as messengers. The moment we stop fighting them, we can finally hear what they have been trying to tell us.

What we call elevation is often nothing more than listening.