listening to the universe

The Universe speaks.  Or your higher self.  Or your totems.  Or maybe through your totems.  Or prayer.  Or meditation.  (Although I do always say that prayer is talking and meditation is listening so I think people who pray a lot don't actually listen much but you know, grace.)  Or maybe the car won't start and you miss a big wreck.  Or you have this feeling that you shouldn't but you do anyway and, disaster.

I got way out of line with the universe one time.  Lots of reasons.  Oh but disaster did come.  My spiritual mentor at that time (a Charismatic) used to laugh and say, "God is just so very gentle with you!"  Haha.  Where I was at that time was not a gentle place; I had been, in fact, a slapped down and slapped down hard and stayed under the jackboot for quite some time.  Because I had not really learned to listen to the universe at that point, at the points leading up to that.  But I had a lot of good info on how to do it, I almost knew how to do it somehow, but one of the main things, the main thing I think, was that I became chemically altered and I don't think you can hear the universe in that state.  And so, when I am listening better, it appears that God, the Universe, whatever, is very gentle with me.

So how I think it is that the universe speaks, yes or no or something else, is very very very quietly.  I think it is a lot like with horses, the universe doesn't actually say "yes" very often because the release, the "yes" as it were, is silence, or alignment, or just integrity (the state of being whole and undivided).  And then, when we persist because mostly we do, the universe speaks more loudly.  Etc.  It takes a l-o-n-g time for a slap down, whatever form it may take.

I appears that the universe is very gentle with me because, get this, I listen.  Yes, I think it is a thing.  Whatever the explanation, of which I'm sure this is as through a glass darkly.

Once upon a time there was this hay ring.  It came to me from the universe, free, at a time I really couldn't afford one and at a time I really wouldn't have been convinced I needed one (and I can still go through several ways to handle it without one).  And that's been five or six years ago?  As many as seven.  And it started falling apart.  Because they do.  Last year it didn't have a couple of the dividers but that didn't really matter.  This year, however, it was gone.  Gone.

The farm needed a hay ring.  Although there are other ways to handle it.  Still.  Finally I decided to buy one, and I looked around and decided which one.  And I shopped and decided where to buy it from.  And I went to order it, finally.  And the darn computer program won't allow for "negative inventory" so I couldn't pay for it when I ordered it which was exactly what I meant to do.  Ten days they said.  Ok.  I called.  It will be in tomorrow.  Day after tomorrow I went in to pay for it, as I needed to pay for it so that someone else could pick it up for me.  The one that had come in wasn't the one I had ordered after all but if I hurried they had the one I had ordered at a store in a neighboring town and I could buy it there.  Off we scurried.  And when we got there our eye got caught by a PVC feeder, and our brains got caught on the idea that we could make that, and that if we could make that for under $100, that would be a very.good.thing.

Well, we couldn't make it for $100.  We very likely couldn't make it at all.  And it was really before we were even through that little rabbit hole (which only took about 40 minutes, drive and all) that I felt like I really should have just gone ahead and bought the one I had planned on buying to begin with.  I called a neighbor with a truck and asked her if I could buy her lunch the next day and we made a date to go get it.  But something was still nagging at me.  Something.  We ate lunch and pulled into the store and parked in front of **the very type that had been delivered to the other store** and I had a good look at it all put together and I thought, that's the hay ring I need.  Heavier duty, sturdier, cheaper, easier to maintain, less likely to be busted apart. 

And I heard the universe clearly, finally.  And that is the universe's new hay ring here at Peaceable Kingdom Farm.