After I came back from the gym I phoned Susan to tell her what had happened. She was amazed and said that something odd had happened to her that morning as well. She said that when she woke up all she could remember from her dreams was the number 179. That was it, just the number 179. She said she had no idea what that meant
I remembered that See Do had told me that I should “listen to Susan.” That she is so close to being right there. Right there, in contact with this wisdom that is inside all of us. And that her spiritual connections are stronger and closer than she yet realizes.
That afternoon we made plans to see a movie. But instead, we met at my place and watched “Winged Migration” on DVD.
At one point, over a scene of geese flying through the clouds near a range of mountains I whispered, “What are they thinking?” and Susan answered, “They’re not thinking anything, they’re just there.”
I realized what she was saying and said, “They’re mediating. They live their lives in mediation.”
After the film, we sat and did what we do: we talked about everything for a couple more hours. At one point I asked Susan to talk about clay, about making clay and working it. She demonstrated how to turn clay on a wheel, saying how the first step is “to center it” and how you do that by actually doing nothing. Just hold it until it finds its center.
Then she showed me how she works the clay in her hands. She said “If you are sensitive to it, it will do what you want.”
I listened, taking in the metaphors See Do said I would hear there.
Later I walked Susan back to her apartment and as we were passing a small park on Dearborn Street, talking about how everything is one thing, Susan said “It’s like water. It’s in the air. It’s in the clouds. It’s mist. It’s rain. It flows around us. It’s outside us. It’s inside us. It’s in our cells. It can refresh us, quench us, nourish us. It can poison us. But it’s all the same thing. It’s all one thing.”
The power of this analogy floored me. We stopped and hugged.
The next day, we spoke by phone and Susan excitedly explained that she had figured out the significance of the number she had woken up with, 179.
She said it came to her that she was close, but needed to take one more step. That she needed to take that next step. She needed to do a 180 – to make that important and fundamental change in her life. And seeing that, she had exploded in a new flow of positive creative energy.
— continued (Next Chapter: How Time streams around us)