I was laying in bed a few nights ago, and I started to think about something I had completely forgotten.  For a period of time, when I was around nine or ten years old, I started picking up injured pigeons in the railroad yard and bringing them home to treat them.  Weather they had an injured foot or wing, I would bring them home, put them in a box on the porch, and treat them by rubbing the injured area with olive oil.  What made me think olive oil had such magical healing powers, I don't know.  I also don't remember where I got the olive oil because my mother, like most in the 1950's, cooked with Crisco.  Whether the olive oil did much, I really don't know (I'll do a post on the real healing abilities of olive oil this week), but I believed it would, and so most of the birds recovered.  It may also be that I had some innate psychic healing abilities that I wasn't really aware of, but they were at work anyway.  Whatever it was, I eventually got a pigeon that was injured too seriously to be healed, and that apparently caused me to give up on the whole thing.  Although when I think about it, I had later incidents scattered through my life when I helped birds. 
     I remember once while I was going to college in California, I was taking a walk near a marsh and saw a large bird with an injured wing, a stork or something similar, and took it to a vet.  Then there was the time one summer a few years ago when I suddenly decided I needed to go get my cell phone out of the car and charge it.  When I did, I found that a young cardinal had flown into the hot car through a window I had left open about two inches, and apparently couldn't get out.  It was on the floor breathing with difficulty in the very hot car and undoubtedly would had died soon if I hadn't found it.  There was another time earlier, when I was living in a townhouse, I found a young bluebird in my yard that apparently was on it's first flight and wore itself out and couldn't get off the ground so it was trying it's best to hide under a small bush.   I knew that in a few hours neighbors' cats would be put out for the night and the bird didn't stand a chance, so I brought it inside, while it's parents swooped at me to try to force me to drop it, put it in a cardboard box with water and food, and let it rest for the night.  When I got up in the morning, it was fluttering around the living room trying to find a way out as it's parents chirped from outside.  I opened the patio door and it flew out and took off with the parents.
    Anyway, the whole idea is that what we believe, individually and collectively, does affect the world around us.