MLMM Sunday Writing Prompt- Sounds of Birds

THIS WEEK’S CHALLENGE: Choose either sight, sound, or smell, and write a memory it triggers in you.

I’m a big fan of actively purposefully connecting with my senses. When something catches my eye, I pursue it for more sensual input. Yes, that’s probably why my career with children has been so rewarding. That’s exactly what kids do and why not being able to touch or sniff a priceless work of art, is unbearable for them.
My example comes from an experiment that asked me to recall a sensation.
I became intrigued by articles about Native American Spirit Animals. There’s no doubt in my mind that human beings are inseparable from Nature and that spiritual signs are everywhere.
So, there was a proposed experiment to find your own ‘spirit animal’. I thought, why not?
The experiment suggested a quiet calm space where you could just clear your mind in a meditative state and the first animal that presented itself to you would be your spirit guide. Did I mention that I was skeptical? I wasn’t even sure that I was capable of clearing my mind.
Well, I did it.
As I sat quietly, I suddenly heard the sound of red-winged blackbirds. I hadn’t heard them in a long while, at that time, because I wasn’t living by a marshy area. (That sound also triggered happy childhood memories of my grandparents’ farm.)
Red winged blackbirds were so outside of what I expected, and so specific, that I became a guarded believer that very day.
I look up animal meaning information often now, especially when I notice an unusual array of them in a time period.
There was such a time period right after my first granddaughter was born, when my photo adventures turned from frogs and salamanders to spiders. I was ALL about finding spiders!
A few years into that new photo fetish, I found my book on animal meanings.
I looked up spiders, for fun.
Spiders mean Grandmother. “The spirit of grandmotherly love.”
Just sayin’.

MLMM Sunday Writing Prompt – Three Senses | Mindlovemisery’s Menagerie (wordpress.com