The snow falls . . .

The snow falls silently outside my tree house window as it has for so many days now.

The birds that are still here seem not to notice as they peck the tree and eat from our feeder.

The squirrels eat corn from the tray we put out, their tails pulled tightly over their backs and around them like a big fur coat. They still romp after one another around the frozen tree and scamper across the blanket of snow with relative ease. Where do they go?

Jays and crows also like the corn. What do the robins eat? They seem happy and healthy as they fly about from branch to branch, but there are no worms.

I see the tracks of rabbits in the snow below and wonder where they go. What do they find to eat? I see tunnels that lead beneath the snow and wonder whose labyrinth they lead to. The surface is white and featureless. Barren and cold. Perhaps there is a whole world of life under that surface we cannot see.

I stay safely behind the glass and wonder, “How are all the creatures of nature so very bold?”

I think about things I cannot know. They do not seem to care at all about these things. Perhaps in their silent evenings in hiding, they too contemplate the universe. Who knows? I read something recently that asked, “Can we be more like them?” I suppose I am thankful we are not, because I am warm and dry as I watch them forage in this frigid environment.

Is thinking a trade-off for bliss? We create our own environment and bring life to us. In exchange we worry, ponder, want, seek, think, dream and strive for more. More money, more knowledge, more comfort, more understanding, more peace, more land, more everything, often figuring out how to take it from someone else, though we should know that abundance is infinite.

They, nature’s creatures, are not so much different than we are. They too fight over the food that is available and chase others away when they can, even though it is always there and always full, every day, all year long. They do this even in the warmer months when food is plentiful. The fear of want pervades all creatures, I suppose, and the greed of the powerful overwhelms the desire of the weak at every layer of nature. It is the way we are all trained, perhaps from before our birth.

Perhaps we will learn to be patient. Perhaps we will learn that joy, wealth, and happiness, as we individually define them, are in infinite abundance and we need not take from one in order to have what we need. Every great wise man and woman has preached this for many thousands of years, and yet it has not sunk in yet, really at any level of our society. Why is that?

Perhaps even I will learn those lessons someday. Today does not feel like one of those days.

It has been a long week . . . I take one last look out my window at the squirrel who seems to look up at me, and the birds flitting about the feeder, and the white expanse beyond, and think, “God bless nature’s creatures. I’m going to make a sandwich . . . “