Ingrid’s message

“I am perplexed. How can an angel suffer?”

– Angel of the Desert, Paula Schlier

Is it not love that we must follow in all its colors and shades?
Is it not the absence of love that creates hell on earth?
It is the grayness of all that makes a human being suffer.
But if we choose to step over our fears and ideologies then we can experience perfect heaven while walking on earth.

Yesterday I had undergone a test and I do not think that I passed this very test:
While walking to work, I encountered a Lady who is living on the streets. In one year I have never met her, even though I am walking along those streets quite often. Others I have crossed many times, but not her. She asked me if I would take a poem off her for a hot chocolate. I said that I had to go to work but that I would give her some money for the poem. She gave me one for good luck. But instead of heading off very quickly, I listened to her. She told me about all the things she had learned in life and she was very educated. I was starting to wonder how an educated person could be living on the streets now. How was that possible? So I said to her: “Maybe you should ask the angels.” She answered that she was doing this all the time and that she was talking to God. So I responded that maybe they had a message for her. While we talked something seemed to change in her and I looked at her. I knew this was a test of a sort. Then she asked me if she could come home with her for a night on the couch.
In came all the things I had learned as a child: Don’t bring strangers home, she could take something,… But first and foremost it made me intensely uncomfortable. I was starting to wonder whether this was my uncomfortableness or hers. While she continued to talk she said: “I would love to hear more about the angels from you.”
I said that we would have to talk to the angels and find each others’ paths again- they would organize it.
But what weighs heavily on my soul today is the fact that I used a little white lie: I said to her that my apartment was rented (which it is) and that I could not have guests, which is not true. I should just have said to her that it made me feel uncomfortable that she asked me this.
I asked her if she did not have a public place to stay, but she explained that she had two bullies who usually took her money. It dawned on me that she also was undergoing a test of standing up for herself in front of the bullies. So we were both being tested at the same time. We agreed to use the help of the angels as our messengers.
But before we parted ways, her voice changed a bit and she had a very ancient mode of expression. She asked me first simply: “Do you have a totem animal?” I answered that I had two. She told me hers and then she said: “Also this she can do.” It was said without judgement or any form of suspicion, in a very neutral tone. Just a simple statement. Another person had used the exact same expression a few months earlier for my fable for Holy Scriptures. It was said in the exact tone and voice. It was an ancient phrase. Who would use such a phrase?

When we parted ways, I had carried away Ingrid’s burdens.

Today I was wondering what the lesson of this encounter was. The old adage of setting boundaries? Or maybe I realized that it is easy to give people money, but it does not change their set of behavioral patterns. It was maybe to load off my personal guilt. I also saw that this would be another possibility for me if I did not have a job, but it had no resonant frequency of fear anymore. I had been homeless twice over the last years and both times I was offered very comfortable shelter by friends! So that fear has disappeared and I feel that the karmic burden has lessened through that. I do not know, but in this moment I felt it was sincere to give her the money as she had given me a personal poem that she had written (which is very deep and meaningful by the way). I felt even happy about it. Partially I felt invaded by being asked. The second test was my lie- I did not pass. So it will come up again. The third lesson was that one can learn many things, have a million talents, but if one does not work with one’s talents then it is a waste of precious time and resources. But the last lesson of this encounter was that divinity is everywhere and that it was a message that we both received. It was that one sentence when I knew for sure that it was a message: “Also this she can do.”

Maybe I do not love enough yet to let someone come into my place, to offer them shelter for a night. Maybe I am still too weak. It felt as if something old left me that I had carried along the way.

I will discover with time what it meant. I need to meet Ingrid again.


Vanessa