What We Wish For

I woke deep in the night to the peculiar sound of raccoon jabber.  For those unacquainted with this dialect there's no use trying to explain. What actually woke me was probably not their intense conversation but the sound of them having it on the second story window sill of my bedroom.  The large plate glass windows let in the reflection of moonlight against the melting snow and so it  was easy to see all three of them perched along the narrow 3 inch window ledge. It was pretty obvious to me that the conference involved whether or not they could figure out how to leap from the ledge to the enticing bird feeder hanging out from a pole just below it.

Watching them so excited and hopeful made me laugh out loud which set off a flurry of scurrying back and forth in surprise.  They are so appealing.  It's hard not to see them as human, with those little faces and tiny hands that reach and touch everything like young children.  They could smell the seed in the feeder but they were young and not experienced enough to know whether or not getting it was doable.  The squirrels have tried over and over to no avail, climbing up to the window ledge and hurling themselves out only to slide off the large plastic baffle on top.  The thought of those fat little raccoons trying that made me laugh even harder and that sent them scrambling down the side of the house.  I snuggled down and went back to sleep, glad they had given up.

Despite all the encouraging talk about reaching out for what we desire, the hard truth is we all have things in our lives that we want so much but just cannot seem to figure out a way to have. Its  awful when it is so close and yet still not for us. Certainly some of those things are material, but the ones that create the deepest longing are those that aren't--the opportunities that slip past, the disappointments following a herculean effort on our part, the challenges we face that have no solution no matter how many times we hurl ourselves out hoping to overcome all obstacles by our sheer  will.  It is little comfort initially but a deeply conscious act at those times, to see events in our lives like those of the natural world, as having an intent  beyond just our satisfaction.  We move closer to our real selves when we acknowledge they carry within them the hard edges we need to learn something just as essential to our nourishment as food.  It is not the way of the world to get everything we want. At some point we are meant to understand that what looks like failure and defeat is really the field sown with surrender and trust and faith and a different set of directions.  Life doesn't want us not to leap out in search of what we want, but to be able to accept there is a reason, which we may never know, for why we do not always receive what we seek when we do.  Those times when the door closes and locks, the leap misses, the problem is truly unresolvable, and countless other moments like them, are when in our quiet waiting we are vulnerable to grace. We may not recognize its presence for a long time, but one day after much more living, we may look back and see the path it created when we relinquished our grip on the reins  of our lives. You can't miss it--look for the miracles.