Finding the stream

It was always there. I just had to channel the flow.

When I was little, we had a stream behind our house. I loved going out there with a stick and moving the water around. Digging channels. Redirecting the current. It was my happiest place to play.

When we bought this house, I could see there was something in the front yard that might once have been a stream. A wetland. A suggestion of water. But it was buried — under downed trees and brambles and poison ivy and, of course, bittersweet.

Last spring and fall, I pulled the bittersweet.

In the winter, we hired a crew to chainsaw and cart off the logs that had been cut down years ago and just left there.

And a week ago, it finally got warm enough to go out with the clippers.

This time, I was looking for the stream.

See it?

It was in there. I could see it. Someone, years ago, had carefully placed rocks. A little riverbed, deliberately made. You could only catch glimpses — a few mossy rocks in a row, a group of others mostly buried.

I followed the rocks. Cut away what had grown up around them — weeds that had become trees. Over two days, I made four enormous brush piles.

Then my husband got into it.

“I have a hacksaw,” he said. “Do you want me to get that really thick one?”

Yes, please.

He hacked until the blade dulled, bought a crowbar, and set to work moving rocks.

You know me, yard work is never just yard work. I’m always processing something else in the background.

Even my husband is on to me now.

“So, what’s the message?” he asked over lunch.

What stands out to me is that the stream was always there.

The water never stopped flowing. It just got diffuse — bleeding out over the banks, spreading into the wetland, disappearing under brush and dead wood until you couldn’t hear it anymore.

That’s what happened to my intuition, too.

It never stopped, it just got covered up and spread so thin I couldn’t find the current.

What I’m doing with the clippers and the crowbar — and in my writing, in my coaching, and in the psychic medium workshop — is the same work.

Not creating something new.

Finding the thing that was always there.

Clearing away what had grown up over the top of it. Making space. Unblocking.

Channeling the flow so I can hear it again.

🕊️

SAM

How about now?