Balancing omens

I'm the sort of people who believes in omens. Yes, I'm a college professor and I know all about confirmation bias. In confirmation bias, a piece of data that corresponds to your belief, positive or negative, will confirm that belief, even if there's a multitude of data that corresponds to the opposite belief. In addition, omens cannot be separated from coincidence, as we cannot test stimulus and response adequately.

I still believe in omens. As a mystic (had you not guessed that?) I find believing in omens and the rest of the unseen world makes for better poetry, and allows my imagination to fly further.  However, I have to maintain a certain amount of detachment to allow them in my life.

The danger in believing wholeheartedly is that I can accept things as omens that will make me feel very negative about my writing. For example, I have received 13 rejections so far on my latest round of Mythos, and if I saw those as omens of how things are going to go, I'd give up here. I have to see them with both parts of my brain (the rational and the whimsical) in order to make sense of them.

I mentioned Dragonfly the other day. Dragonfly is my omen of unexpected things. When Dragonfly flies loops around me, with his jeweled strength and fragility, he tells me to look outside rather than staying within, because life is going to surprise me and I don't want to miss it. When Dragonfly buzzes in my ear and crashes against me, I'm either being really dense or I'm really missing something going on around me. (Or, the rational side of my brain says, he thought there was a bug in my ear, which is entirely possible and thank you for eating it, Dragonfly.)

I'm selective with my omens. If a black cat crosses my path, I pet it and say, "You're a kitty!" If I break a mirror, I say "Oh, shit." But there are things -- Dragonfly is one -- that I read as omens. There are a fewe others that I will talk about another time.

What are your omens?