Serial Griever: Symbols and Mysticism
I’ve spent a long time not believing in things like symbols or thin places, but some things just can’t be coincidences. In the last year, I’ve been forced to see through the veil. There are things that have happened — small moments, subtle shifts in my reality — that make the messages impossible to dismiss entirely. White feathers float around me in my bright moments and rainbows follow me along the Highland roads I’ve driven up a hundred times. These signs might have been there all along, but I was too wrapped up in the practicalities of life to truly see them, too grounded in the logical explanations of why. But now, they feel like threads, subtly weaving me into something larger, something beyond what I can fully understand or touch. Something, or someone, is talking to me through the wind and the waves.
The other side of this is that some things can really just be coincidences. Once upon a time, on a warm summer’s day in July, I was sitting on my mum's rocking chair, staring at the hills, lost in thought, when a dead bird landed at my feet. I remember the thud, the finality of it, the way it seemed to mock me through its own symbolic meaning. I had to force myself not to google the symbolism of a dead bird crashing at your feet, knowing my assumptions would be confirmed. Was this a message of impending doom? A dark omen? Or simply the natural world going about its business?
Between white feathers and dead birds, I’m not quite sure whether I wholly believe in symbols yet. I have one foot in the world of logic, but now at least a toe in something else. I don’t let them all lead me astray, but I do let the healing ones lead me down the path of their intentions. Maybe it’s just my mind trying to make sense of grief, to find patterns in the randomness, and I’m content to let it.
Illustration by Aoife White
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