As I scanned the forest floor this morning on a hike I found the sweetest little home, fit only for a fairy, or at least that’s what I told myself when I bent down to pick it up and examine it closer. It was so totally unassuming nestled down in a bed of leaves alongside the trail, no larger than a thimble. It was the hollow of an acorn actually and in it were the three tiniest little mushrooms I have ever seen; a miniature universe unto itself. And I thought to myself, does the creature who inhabits this place know that there is a forest out here? I found myself laughing, vacillating back and forth between childlike wonder and a kind of scrutinizing seriousness.
And the closer I looked at this microcosm within the much larger macrocosm of the forest, it so closely illustrated what I had been talking about with my friend just moments before. I had been explaining to him that for all of the years I’ve been on this planet I’ve been asking myself, in one way or another, what do I want from this life? It’s only been within the last several months that I began asking myself what does life want from me?
The very act alone of asking that question flung open new doors of perception and in the blink of an eye changed the way I see life. It’s brought me slowly closer to cooperation WITH life and has been teaching me how to walk softly on this earth rather than trying to impose my will on some made-up idea of how life ‘should’ be or how it’s meant to serve me alone.
Sometimes we can feel like our lives are like that hollowed out acorn. Maybe it’s really cozy and snug in there for a while or maybe it’s overcrowded with furniture and clutter that we fail to see that there’s a whole world out there; a world outside or ourselves and that there are beings who need us and also beings who we need to help us.
So when I ask the question what does life want from me it might be more accurate to propose how I might invite Love to use my life for its own purposes. We’re not here on a selfishly unabated quest to fulfill ourselves by virtue of another OR to sequester ourselves from being in service to the rest of the world. Sure we can tend to our own acorns or to our little corner of the woods, but let us not forget that there’s a forest out there. We are not walking this path alone. We are here to learn how to receive as well as how to give; to be in service of Love. We are nestled within this cosmic vastness yet paradoxically not other than IT. We can either choose to be in cooperation with it or be in competition with it, a battle not worth fighting nor can ever be won.
-Chrissy Leake
That is wonderful and amazing. You were paying attention; otherwise you probably wouldn’t have seen it. Intention captures our attention and frees it at the same time!