Victory Dance

You are at a meeting in Santa Monica with your much adored University of Santa Monica project team, and the universe has conspired to have you forget that you are in a two hour parking space, so you never go downstairs to move the vehicle. You will need the lesson that is still six days away. You do, however, at approximately the time you are receiving the ticket, feel disoriented and call out “Earthquake,” not realizing that this is an earthquake of the inner world.

After a delightful nearly four hours, you walk to your car basking in the energy of the meeting. Your masters in spiritual psychology weekend is to begin in just over an hour and life is good. Arriving at your car you see something under the windshield wiper. You grab it, plop into the driver’s seat, and look at the document. It is a $61.00 parking ticket.

Your inner victim is unleashed even though the two-hour parking sign is just feet away; you want something or someone else to be responsible. You remember that the last time you’d gotten a parking ticket was in Santa Ana and wonder if perhaps you should avoid cities beginning in the word – Santa – and perhaps, you muse, it has something to do with your bah humbug attitude about the man of the same name.

Although the ticket did portend the bit of emotional victimhood that you experience during the weekend, you do have a good class. The days after class go smoothly, and you feel your inner world shifting.

You are paying bills when you take the parking ticket from its envelope and see that there is second ticket. You accept your part in getting the first ticket, but the second creates a state of confusion.

At first you think this must be someone else’s ticket, but when you look more closely it is a $35.00 ticket for a missing front license plate. With your victim-self up front and center, you move swiftly into denial.

You run down to your garage and notice that you indeed have no front license plate, and actually, you have no way to attach a front license plate. You are angry because a front license plate will ruin the beautiful Cars look of your Cube, so you do the first thing you can think of and call your Nissan dealer.

You ask about the necessity of a front plate and hear that in California you do need one. You ask in a most snippy manner how one is supposed to put a license plate on a car that has no place for a license plate. You are told that you should have brought the car in when you received your plates eight months ago, and that if you bring in the plate they will install it. You ask if there will be a charge; you do not get a straight answer.

You want to make them pay for the ticket and perhaps burn at the stake, but you don’t know how to logically put the oweness (which you don’t know how to spell) on them because you realize that you are in crazy person overdrive and you also have a niggling feeling that perhaps you did know but ignore this because you didn’t want to ruin the cuteness of your Cube’s face.

Perhaps it is your fault, but rather than moving into loving forgiveness, you successfully, habitually, and quickly move into self-loathing and frustration on a magnitude of the earthquake you felt six days earlier. You remember the words of your writing group telling you that you are way too hard on yourself, but you are just not in the mood for a lecture – or to feel better. You cry and scream and wonder how you will find the plate placed God-knows-where nine months ago. Nine months you think, what are you giving birth to?

You are aware that if you do not find the plate you will probably have to pay for a new one. You catastrophize about how you be unable to drive your Cube until you have received the million dollar plate from the incompetent DMV hopefully by the time you are 60.

You decide that it must be somewhere, and you begin the tear-filled hunt. You look in some obvious places such as the filing cabinet to no avail. You run into the garage and look around at the multitude of boxes, many of which you’ve been through and know it is not there. You decide to look on the movable shelf anyway. You pull out a plastic milk carton filled with miscellaneous bruhaha from the family room before you changed your floor to the stupid tile which makes your bare feet freeze in the winter. You find, amazingly enough, the cat brushes you have been wondering about and semi looking for during the past several weeks.

Your positive energy begins to return as you marvel at your ability to emotionally yoyo. You reason that just as the brushes were around, so must be the license plate.

You remember that part of your spiritual psychology second year project is working with your intuition and you are aware that you have a golden opportunity. At first you just follow a few “logical hits,” but they are all disappointing; however, you are not willing to give up (you are now on the manic side of life). You wonder if you should just let things percolate, but then realize that perhaps this would be a good opportunity to actually use your intuition intentionally.

You sit down, close your eyes, take a breath, state your intention out loud – “I want to find the second license plate for my Cube” – and then you let the question go. You take in a breath and move to your gut. Immediately, you feel something heavy – something on top of something else. Then you move your attention out to the borders of your body and you see, clear as day, the lower kitchen cabinets next to the pantry. Your first reaction is “I would never have put it there.” But you are not going to look this gift horse in the mouth, and you run down the freezing tile staircase and into the kitchen. You start with the cabinet nearest the fridge opening each door and rummage though. When you get to the last cabinet you open the door. There sticking out from under a load of serving plates you never use, is the license plate. You have some trouble getting it out because the plates are heavy.

You laugh and feel like a nutcase for having put it there in the first place, but holding the license plate facing you in both hands, and pumping it up and down, you do your victory dance around the house while singing “Yes, oh yes, oh yes, oh yes!”

You go lightly upstairs to your clean desk, excited to pay the $35.00 ticket for this inexpensive class that is moving you forward on your path to being more consciously in tune with yourself.

Days later your inner vampire takes hold and starts to tell you that you put the plate there yourself no matter how unconsciously, so of course you would be able to get that information. You begin to sing the song “Die Vampire Die,” and your inner Dracula swings his boney, cape-covered arm in front of his face. Only his eyes show as he backs his nasty life sucking body away. He may return someday, but you are prepared. You found the license plate. Next stop the lost keys, and then maybe actually touching base with those who are gone from this place. Your hope springith eternal because you just never know.

copyright 2010 by Nancy Grossman