What I've learned from the cardinal at my window

I have a cardinal that comes to my tree house window every day. When the sun hits the glass just right, she can see her reflection and according to the experts, she mistakes it for another bird. And so, she attacks.

But I have my doubts. I've never put too much faith in so-called experts. And I happen to have an alternate theory for what that cardinal is doing.  See, I think she knows it's her own reflection. But I believe she's beating herself up.

Now maybe I'm projecting. I admit it's entirely possible given my recent fish blunder.  But it got me thinking that maybe this bird knows something I don't.  So I decided to give the "cardinal technique" a shot.

I stood in front of the full-length mirror that hangs behind the tree house door. And like the cardinal, I attacked my reflection. I said every bad thing I'd thought about myself recently. I got personal. I got creative. I pulled out every character flaw and personal failure and self-doubt I'd ever had and I hurled them at myself, one by one. I was merciless. I was loud. I was surprisingly long-winded.

And as I did it, something interesting happened. The words lost their power. Just  the act of uttering them made it completely obvious how ridiculous they really are.

One day about 20 years ago, I had a long conversation with a voodoo man. It took place in the hot tub at my apartment complex, which I realize kind of ruins the whole "other worldly" feel of the story. Then again, real life always does. But I digress.

He was a practitioner of Santeria, which is a mixture of voodoo and Catholicism that originated in West Africa and the Caribbean.  And he told me a number of things that had a great impact on me and that I try to put into practice to this day.  The most important of which was "When you pray, pray out loud.  Because speaking it brings it into being."

But in this case, I think it's the exact opposite. Leave these dark thoughts unspoken and they stay inside your head, eating at you like a parasitic worm.  But bring them out into the open and they wither and die. They simply can't withstand the light of day.

So go ahead. Beat yourself up every once in a while. It's amazingly cathartic. Say to your own face the things that no one else would ever dare to. Then fly away and leave them behind.