Bad Dreams, Bad Luck, Turtles and Kismet
I’m not entirely sure where to begin with this story because it involves so many things, some of them linear, but most of them existing beside each other, interrelating.
As you may recall from a recent Instagram post, I’m starting to explore shadow work. This is a concept from Carl Jung and relating to our dark side - or the facets of yourself that you don’t like, and thus ignore. Some of you might know that I use tarot cards to help build my intuition. If I have a question about how I feel about something, or what I think I should do, I use my response to whatever card(s) I pull to give me clues to how I feel about something. For those who also use tarot, you might be interested to know that last week I got the High Priestess one day and a few days later, got her again, but reversed. (Also worth noting, the High Priestess is the card I chose to put on my music t-shirts.)
Oh boy I can tell this is going to be a long one. If you stick with me to the end, I hope you believe me that I think it will be entirely worth it.
Intuition
Intuition is a powerful tool to use in public speaking. It helps you to write, it helps you to communicate. It helps you make decisions in the moment. It gives you useful information about your audience.
But over time, and especially if you’ve experienced bullying, abuse, trauma, gaslighting, often your need for safety puts layers over top of your intuition, and then your relationship with trusting your inner compass is hurt.
So. I have realized over the last few months that something inside of me is blocked. For so long I didn’t realize what it was, but I had a sense that there was something I’d been ignoring or that I hadn’t actually dealt with a situation I thought I had. It’s hard to put a finger on it, but I trusted what I was feeling and decided to give it the weight it was asking for.
Recently, I had a bit of a revelation, and am slowly starting to compile resources to help with this block. And to be clear, it’s not going to be one thing. It’s going to be a series of several things, and especially of listening to my inner voice as it guides me. This is not always easy to do.
Sunday.
Sunday morning, I awoke at 5am after having a horrible nightmare. I hope you won’t mind that I don’t share it here, but let’s just say it was about the worst thing that could possibly happen.
When I woke, I knew it was a dream, which brought relief, but I also suddenly realized that I was supposed to cry. That my body was giving me an opportunity to release some blocked up emotions. My husband had slept on the couch because he hadn’t been able to fall asleep, so I was alone, and I went for it. I am telling you, I sobbed. I let out hurt sounds (mindful, of course, that my family were still sleeping in this house, haha). I allowed my body to shake and feel and expel. I had a strange detachment to it all because I knew it was old stuff finding its way out, but I decided not to think about it too much and continue to listen to what my body was telling me.
I listened to my inner voice and followed the instructions that were coming to me. And then I fell back asleep and woke up feeling quite light.
But that was just how the day started.
The Drive
My husband and I love to go for drives, and my daughter hates it, but usually we’ll take a drive on one of the weekend days. It’s something to do and it gives us all a chance to talk or just to watch the world go by. Our route, lately, takes us past Gananoque, over to Rockport, and then back home. My daughter suggested that a good compromise (since she hated drives) was to bring her bicycle and ride along the trail in Rockport. We agreed.
However, just as we were getting ready to go, I could not fit her bicycle into the car. This created a lot of emotion for her. We brought her scooter instead, but she wasn’t happy.
So there was some tension before even heading out.
We headed to the gas station, filled up, and just as we were driving again, the tire pressure warning signal came on. Now, to give you some background here, we have had bad luck with flat tires over the past couple of years. Even at the beginning of the pandemic, when my husband came to pick me up from work on Friday the 13th, the last day I’d ever work at that job, we had a flat. And had to use the donut for the next several weeks because mechanics weren’t available. We filled up the tires and the pressure light went off. Phew. Yet, we’re still wondering if there’s a leak…
We decided to order a treat at Tim Hortons, but my daughter was still so angry that she didn’t want a treat. (!!!) When the cashier handed my husband his large iced capp, it dropped and exploded all over the inside of the car.
Yep.
Amazing, right? We had to stop, and scoop out frozen coffee from the carpet, mindful of not wanting to use a public washroom right now. It probably took about 10 minutes. Thankfully we’d brought hand sanitizer, lysol spray and had lots of water, but so far, this trip had been reeeeeeeally fun, eh?
We finally get rolling, and begin to relax a bit. Our daughter in the back has her nose in an Archie, and we’re up front talking about life while the summer greenery streams by, and things begin to feel good.
We’re about 10 minutes past Gananoque when we see the first one. A turtle on the road. We’ve become pretty used to stopping and helping them get to the side that they’re headed. And we go ahead and do that.
Gratitude
So here’s another piece that I want to add, and it relates back to an experience from about 10 years ago where I was leaving my doctor’s office, and it was quite snowy. An elderly woman was trying to get over a snow bank so that she could get into her car. She was struggling, so I offered her help, and I had this profound feeling of gratitude for the opportunity to help her. I mean profound.
I mean that I’m still thinking about it 10 years later. Because it occurred to me at that moment that it is a gift to be able to help people. I know that you have a similar story (or several) in your life, right? The thankfulness you get from helping another? From that point on, I came to appreciate helping people from a totally different perspective.
Turtles
So back to the first turtle (yes that is foreshadowing). We didn’t let our daughter leave the car because it was the side of the highway, but we saw the turtle to safety, and got back in the car and continued on.
And not 5 or 6 minutes later, lo and behold we see another turtle. But this one is a big one. I mean at least 4 times the size of the first. And this one, sadly, is a bit injured.
So again, we stop the car, and this time my daughter asks if she could come, and we say yes as long as she listens and stays away from the road (but not in the tick-potential tall grass). We can see a big scrape on the turtle’s shell. There’s some blood there. Not much, probably what you’d get if you scraped your knee, but of course, we don’t know how this scrape happened, and if there’s more injury that we don’t know about.
I also notice a bit of blood on his or her tail, along with moss. This is one old turtle.
And friends, this turtle was crying. It sucker punched me straight to my core. (I’ve since come to learn that turtles cry a lot, and actually they’re just cleaning out their eyes, but as a sensitive dork, it was so distressing to me.)
Safety
But whatever the case, this turtle is on the road, injured, and we have to get it at least to the grass. So my husband gets some old mitts, and we try a couple of little tests to see if lifting it will really hurt, and it doesn’t seem to, so he lifts the turtle to safety (this turtle was heavy), and just as he’s putting it down, it whips its head around and snaps. Which freaked eeeeverybody out.
At this point, we’re trying to decide if we should try to take the turtle somewhere, or if the injury is a simple scrape. A car comes along, and it’s a police car, so we flag the officer down and ask if he knows what to do. He does not. But he is willing to help.
Ontarioturtles.ca says that you should always bring in an injured turtle. I’d left a message with them. The officer made a call, and somebody suggested we call Sandy Pines, which is a sanctuary we are familiar with. We’ve brought injured birds and squirrels to Sandy Pines, and they are always willing to take in any animal that needs help. Both Ontarioturtles.ca and Sandy Pines thought it was important to bring the turtle in, since an open wound can open the turtle up to infection, and we don’t really know the trauma inflicted on the poor buddy from whatever had caused the injury. You have to bring the animals to Sandy Pines yourself as they are dealing with many, many animals and don’t have the capacity to pick them up.
But How?
We agree to bring the turtle in, but the next question is... how? We don’t have any cardboard boxes big enough in our car, and neither does the police officer.
Cue the neighbouring farm children who come to take a look and see what all the fuss is about. We ask them if they could ask their parents for a box. The officer goes back to their house with them and we continue to mind the turtle. Again, my daughter is unhappy. The snapping turtle scared her, she’s hot on the side of the road, but doesn’t want to be in the car alone. She didn’t get her bike ride, and now she’s definitely not going to get her scooter ride as we have to drive back to Kingston before heading to Napanee to deliver the turtle.
The officer returns with a sort of half bottom of a box (it’ll do), and then the next question is how to get this snapping turtle into the box. To try and save a bit of time here, the officer and my husband got the turtle into the box, and you can watch a little movie about it here.
In order that the turtle didn’t die from the heat and lack of air in the trunk, we had to put one of the back seats forward, leaving an airway to the turtle, but also removing a barrier between the turtle and my 8 year old daughter who is legally not allowed to sit in the front seat.
So that was a thing. But it was literally the only way to make it work, and she managed to face her fear that the giant injured snapping turtle would crawl out of the box into the back seat.
Symbolism
Let’s take a second to look up what turtles symbolize. Just for fun.
In many North American Indigenous cultures, the turtle symbolizes Mother Earth. North America is also called Turtle Island among Iroquoian and Algonquian speaking people.
Turtles are a symbol of longevity and perseverance.
Turtles are often associated with good luck.
A turtle crossing your path is supposed to remind you to trust in your own way of working things out. Which we know as…
…wait for it…
Intuition.
Listening
So, back to our story. We have a dog who was home, but it was close to her peeing time, and we were pretty sure that our kid needed a break from all this drama, so we decided that my husband would drop us at home and continue to Napanee to deliver the turtle to safety at Sandy Pines.
My daughter asked if she could ride her bike while we took the dog for a walk, and I agreed, and off we went. I was starting to unwind from the dramatic arc of the day when my daughter started to let me know how the day had made her feel. Out of respect for her privacy, I’ll skip the conversation. However, 2 important things happened relating to my intuition.
She was starting to rip into me about how the drive and turtle saving experience had gone for her, and how she had been very unhappy and felt ignored and isolated. I started to get frustrated with her - we were trying to save a turtle! Couldn’t she see that? Just then the dog picked up a bone - a pretty large t-bone. The dog loves bones, and bone shards are pretty terrible for dogs, and this was a massive one, so I started to use my deep and loud voice to say no, and try to pry her jaws open. I was getting nowhere. Something inside of me said “go gently”, and I loosened my prying fingers a little, and started to use a soothing voice, and suddenly the dog relaxed and I got the bone out - part of it was already in her throat.
This made me realize that I also needed to be gentle and loving with my daughter, and allow her to vent and to see the experience from her perspective. And I did, and there was a shift. I let her talk it out as much and as long as she needed, and I kept speaking back to her what I was hearing, and she either agreed or would correct me. And I felt like a good mother because I felt like I’d allowed my child to be properly seen, and I allowed my perspective to change.
Kismet
Once the day was winding down, the turtle was safe, and our child was sleeping, my husband and I had a chance to talk. I talked about the absolute gift it is to be able to help. Both people and animals, it feels really good to help something else be healed or work towards full potential. I made the connection between helping the turtle, and helping my clients. It is a gift.
And then we realized 2 very important things:
If my daughter’s bike had been able to fit into the trunk, we would not have been able to bring the turtle to rescue at Sandy Pines. Like I said, that turtle was big and the only available box we could find would not have fit.
If the iced cappuccino hadn’t spilled in the car, the police officer would not have driven by when we were there, and without that additional person, we wouldn’t have been able to help the turtle.
Addendum
My husband called Sandy Pines this morning and the turtle is doing well. They used a sealant to cover over the damaged part of the shell, and it’s in a tank relaxing. We’d marked on the map where we’d picked it up and will return him or her to their home once they are back in good shape.
And so? I’d love to know your thoughts on this story. Anything interrelated that I missed? Anything you gleaned? Any similar stories you want to share? Let me know in the comments below!
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