Do you trust your Intuition?
Like everything in life, there are upsides, there are the downsides. There is no perfect job, no perfect relationship, no perfect home and no perfect life.
We make the choices that choose our turns in life. No matter how well we think we’ve done in making a choice, they sometimes just don’t turn out but sometimes they do.
How many times have you heard someone use the term ‘intuition’?
I think the first time I heard that word was as a kid of maybe 10 or 11 years old. I grew up in a very rural town outside Charlotte called Matthews, NC. Our closest neighbor was a half-mile away. It was in the country and I did things country boys do. Climb trees, damn up the creek, chase frogs, scout the tracks of critters in the snow and collect the shedded snake skins.
My mother would say ‘the only good snake is a dead one’ She was afraid of any and all slithering creatures. She cared nothing at all about trying to decide if it was a good one or not. If she had a gun, she would shoot it. Yes, she could handle a shotgun. If she had a shovel, there was a headless snake, she was a terror with a garden hoe, she was lethal.
We lived in a day and time where there was no trash collection. You had a burn barrel or two, it’s what everyone did back in the early 60’s in rural NC. If you couldn’t burn it you would carry it off to the unofficial dump.
On this particular summer day, my task was to help Mom carry something to the dump. It was an old piece of furniture and too much for an undersized 10 year old to handle. Most of the way was a well worn path, once that gave out, the short distance to the dump which was just a big ditch was through a large stand of pine trees. My Mom is in the lead and I’m just behind and to this day I can’t really explain why I said ‘stop’ but my Mom did. She stopped dead in her tracks and said ‘what’s wrong’. My response was, ‘just wait a second’. I sat my end down and so did she. She said ‘we are almost there’ I said ‘I know, but let’s wait a minute’. I took a few steps toward her and I saw something moving in the brown pine needles. Then I heard my Mom scream ‘snake’! She stood there frozen and I pulled her back and she said ‘oh my God, it’s a Copperhead. Sure enough she was right, hidden perfectly in the blended tones of the pine needles. It was big one too and he was already curled ready to strike.
I’ve never seen my Mom run so fast. She headed straight for the tool shed, grabbed a hoe and said ‘we’re going to kill that thing’. Surprisingly enough, he was still there so clearly not one on the higher end of the intelligence spectrum for Copperheads. Had he known what was coming, he would have been in the next county. Even to this day, I’m amazed at how accurate and forceful my Mom was with that hoe. He was sliced and diced in a matter of seconds.
On the way back to the house, she said ‘ you know you just saved my life’ I’m trying to get my 10 year old brain to understand. She said ‘it’s your intuition Jon’ You have it, you live in these woods.
For months, my Mom told that story.
Some things are just hard to explain. Maybe it was intuition that day, whose to say? No matter, there was no bad outcome that day unless you happend to be a fat Copperhead in the wrong place at the wrong time in rural North Carolina.
