A most ironic sign

Strange when the message indicating one’s overindulgence lies within one of the indulgences.

As we are now into the summer months where I work, the buildings are like a scene from The Quiet Earth. The echoes of the students have since dissipated from the classrooms weeks ago. I buzz from room to room like a bee, alighting on the pistil of each computer, pollinating them with prerequisite upgrades and clean-up fixes.

It is a bittersweet time in a way, peaceful yet lonely. While the rays of the summer sun bring out children at play and bright colored flowers and the darting of mating finches, this time of year is when I sometimes turn within. As I walk through vacant school buildings with my work routine in tow, I often don my iPod stuffed with tasty and delicious podcasts that delve into the spiritual and metaphysical, though I will intermittently interject these listening sprees with music, or a sci-fi short story from Escape Pod.

Going on these spiritual, psychic, metaphysical, and intuitive information benders eventually leads to my mind becoming bloated with esoterica. I become the kite, the tag with which my wife has christened me, flapping frantically in the wind, the tether of twine threatening to snap at any minute, leaving me ungrounded and unreachable for an indeterminate period of time. Seven to eight hours daily of spiritual and psychic talk, chat, teachings, and general info can leave one rather unfettered.

This leads me to the irony that became unveiled through one of the podcasts. I had come upon a show from Contact Talk Radio called The Urban Mystic Hour, hosted by Marlene Chapman. I was very much drawn to her subject matter as she is a proponent of the idea that our outer world is merely a reflection of our inner landscape. She believes that incidents in our lives often serve as signs and symbols of that which is internal. A leak in one’s plumbing might indicate how we may or may not be dealing with our emotions. Trouble starting our car may be analogous to where we are having trouble getting started with some endeavor in our lives. These ideas really resonated with me, so I subscribed to her podcast.

To fill up my podcast reservoir I then subscribed to Psychic Say So Radio with Ellen Mahloy, also on Contact Talk Radio. I then voraciously devoured these shows like a loose goat in a farmer’s market. I shrugged off the usual initial indications of trouble as my kite fluttered past the posted warning of high winds: The mental astigmatism challenging my ability to focus on any given thing for very long, the low dull headache that peaked from around the corner into my left frontal lobe, the restlessness…

Then came the signs. In my system of belief, the signs start emerging when I am not picking up the aforementioned hints. First sign came with me dropping my iPod which created a nice diagonal crack running across the top left corner of the screen. Luckily the unit remained completely operational despite the damage. Later that evening I took a break from my numerology study to make some dessert. In the process I managed to drop the lid to the food processor, breaking off a piece that latched it onto the chamber. The next day while mentally fluttering 500 feet in the air after another deluge of podcasts I managed to drop my brand new coffee tumbler, breaking the air venting piece off of the lid.

One break, two break, three break… what was the message? Break. Take a break already. Take a break from the way out, the esoteric, and come join the day-to-day with the human race. Plant my feet in terra firma. Touch ground for awhile, Major Tom. The irony is the very material that brought my awareness to identifying these signs is same material from which I need to take a respite.