NOT A CHANCE – The Inevitable Reward of Expecting Wonder

This afternoon I had a clarity rush, one of those rare flashes of awareness and understanding you experience when you suddenly see—and just totally get—everything.

This time I was driving, sitting at a stop light. I glanced around at the far-from-remarkable surroundings: the Quarry shopping center with its Target and Home Depot; the McDonald’s and Taco Bell across the street; the other cars and drivers.

Somehow, on the median next to me, a narrow strip of waist-high weeds caught my eye. Again, quite unremarkable, right? But as I watched them sway gently in the breeze, a flood of wonder and joy washed over me. And gratitude, that such a fine little community of herbal drifters had managed to put down roots here—even those pariahs, goldenrod and ragweed—and that I was here to behold it.

           In that one extraordinary moment, 
           I knew everything there was to know 
           about those weeds.

I understood completely what a gift from God those living wonders are—and how much I would miss, if no longer able to receive such simple gifts in my daily comings and goings, merely setting eyes on them once again.

In that one extraordinary moment, I knew everything there was to know about those weeds. I mouthed words of thanks for their colors and textures and smells and movement. For the sweet, life-giving oxygen they produce. For the tiny biosphere they form, and all the bugs that dwell in, on and under them. And even the family of bunnies I knew, somehow, must live in there.

At the very instant my lips pursed for the “b” in “bunnies,” a young cottontail hopped out of the underbrush onto the adjacent patch of grass, turned and looked up at me.

Coincidence? Not a chance! Not today!

And then the light turned green.

PHOTO: Pixabay