Our winter storm last week left me disconnected.  Not powerless – even though that’s how I felt.  Just disconnected.

I was only without electricity for about two hours in the middle of the night.  But I woke up on Thursday of last week to no cable connection.  Thus no television, and even worse. . . . no internet.  Nine inches of snow that melted from the roads and my driveway in just one day.  But no internet connection for a week.

That’s when my suspicion was verified.

I am an addict.

I’m addicted to the internet.

I get all antsy when I have no internet connection.  Because, you see, browsing the internet is my escape when I don’t want to be.  When I want to escape, to think about anything except what I’m feeling, I browse the internet or stream a television show.

So I ended up with a week of detox from my addiction.  Yes, I did have my iPhone, but the screen is so small and the connection is so slow that it just didn’t serve as much of an escape.

I ended up doing what I’d have told someone else to do.  I tried to be with what I was feeling.  With anxiety, with feeling vulnerable, with feeling not in control, with feeling worried.  Just be with those feelings.

Emotions were stirring, probably coming to the surface for me to let them heal and let them go.  I felt that I was – that I am – getting close to a breakthrough.

That breakthrough hasn’t arrived . . .  yet.

But I have had messengers to help me along.

Messengers that came in the form of hawks.

In a walk before our winter storm and on walks this Sunday and an outing on Monday, hawks have visited me in the Chickamauga Battlefield.  A hawk would appear when I was deep in thought, when I was not being present to nature and its beauty as I was walking by or through fields and trees.  On the first visitation a hawk seemed to lead me on my walk.  It even showed up perched beside the road on my drive home.  On the second visitation a hawk circled over me, another hawk doing the same much higher in the sky.  On the third visitation it called to me and my friend.  Yes, called, over and over.  And circled.  And called some more.

Okay!  You have my attention!

I take hawk visitations seriously ever since two circled over me for a long, long time while I stood at my father’s grave about a month after his death 15 years ago.  That was in February, too.

 

I see hawks as messengers.

The question is: what are they telling me now?

I don’t have to think about that for long.  I know what the message is.

It’s pay attention.  To the present, to where you are, to who you are, to the now.

 

Pay attention.

 

You don’t have to figure everything out.  Ride the currents, be present to the flow.

Be here now.

Even when you feel antsy and disconnected, the currents are still there.

Ride them.