A while back, I set out a hanging flower basket on my front porch. It was full of petunias, and it looked lovely.
Hanging baskets make perfect homes for birds, so it wasn’t long before two wrens moved in to build their nest.
They were super cute and the whole thing was lovely until a neighborhood cat saw the nest. She began to calculate her leap into the basket’s center.
Realizing what I had to do, I moved the petunias to a different location, impossible for the cat to reach. This new location was also undesirable for birds, so they abandoned their new home.
And they may well have been very upset at all of the devastation they had experienced.
After all: they had found one another. They had found a perfect place to nest. They had begun building a very cozy place together, and then, poof!
Their basket was moved to some godawful spot in the sun for no reason they could comprehend. All of their dreams — shattered, in one senseless moment.
But this scenario is preferable to one where they build their nest, hatch their eggs, and the cat picks off their hatchlings, one by one.
In witnessing the destruction of their home, these wrens were saved a worse fate. They simply didn’t know it. And they never will.
There are many forces at play in our world. Spider webs are their own unique galaxies: spun, free-standing realms that are largely invisible to beings other than the spider. Yet they are all a spider knows of life on Earth.
And of course, the world of the earthworm is often unnoticed by earthlings — a world of toil and darkness, played out beneath our feet. It’s a habitat we can’t live without, but rarely consider in our daily lives.
There are so many different layers to life on the planet. Surely we all intersect with one another through some all-pervading wisdom.
And if we do, then perhaps those moments of complete disaster in our lives — when our fabulous nesting environment has been suddenly destroyed, and we don’t understand why — maybe in those moments, some benevolent force is at play.
We creatures on Earth aren’t given very many tools of perception, after all. The bat knows a different world than the snake, and for the fish and the human, it’s utter contrast, again.
There’s a lot that we can’t perceive — but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing there.
When things ‘don’t work out’ for you, consider that they are, in fact, working out exactly as they should. Don’t let perceived setbacks ever stop you from building your nests in life. There’s a multidimensional, dynamic pattern much larger than we know that’s constantly evolving through time and space, and we are each an integral part of it.
Your job in this ever-shifting kaleidoscope is to follow your instincts and let go of the results.
Shine your brightest light in all that you do – the rest is not up to you.
