It’s rather silly to think about old wives’ tales, superstitions, and any spiritual connection you might have with the earth. I take myself for a realist aftwerall when so many bad things happen in life, you tend to ignore anything that might be a sign.
That’s not to say I don’t believe in luck, though. I’ve had countless conversations about karma. My friend John told me he stopped believing in it a long time ago. “Good things always happen to bad people,” he said.
I sat with that for a minute. I’ve always held onto the thought that no matter how someone appears on the surface, we all carry our own private struggles. The people who seem to have “it all” might not be living the glamorous life we assume.
Luck is something I’ve experienced since I was a young girl, finding lost wallets, loose cash, even bank cards on the ground. I always took it as a sign. Later, I started getting lucky at Bingo, something my mother loves.
So I wanted to protect whatever luck I had. Not out of greed, but because of a quiet voice in my mind insisting that if I do good, good will find its way back to me.
A good friend of mine thought this was silly, you can’t stake your hope on a feeling. But I don’t actually expect anything in return. I just know I’m a good person, and when something good comes my way, I want to be able to accept it without the weight of I don’t deserve this.
It’s complicated, though. Even now, good things make me uneasy. I always feel like there’s a catch.
And yet on every cold morning, in every lonely moment there’s a magpie sitting at the edge of my mind, watching me. And I panic. Is it judging me? Like some quiet god deciding whether I’m worthy of good fortune?
I’ve never actually seen a real magpie do anything but hop along a fence or pick at something shiny in the grass. It doesn’t know me. It doesn’t know what I’ve done or haven’t done. And yet I’ve built it into something else entirely, a witness, a scale, something keeping score.
Maybe that’s the truth of it. Maybe the magpie was never judging me at all. Maybe I was the one keeping score, and I just needed somewhere to put that feeling so it wasn’t sitting directly on my chest.
I think about the old rhyme one for sorrow, two for joy and how strange it is that we decided a bird could carry the weight of an entire day’s fortune. But we did. Someone, long before me, looked at a magpie and needed it to mean something too.
So maybe worthiness was never really the question. Maybe the real question is whether I can let good things sit with me without needing to explain them, without needing to earn them first. Whether I can let the magpie just be a bird and let the good, when it comes, just be good.
-C
DEVOTION 