A few years ago I was cleaning out a storage space. I came across a large rectangular box that held a few canvasses. In the usual chaos of life that box had apparently been overlooked, and shoved to the back of our pole barn.

I hauled out the dusty oversize box and after a sneezing fit pulled out everything inside only to discover the box held more than stretched canvas on frames. A nervous tiny deer mouse stared back at me shivering with fright. Whiskers twitching and perfectly round liquidy, beady black eyes bulged out from the sides of her pointed little face. I quickly deduced it was a ‘her’ because all around her were squirmy, blind bundles of pink flesh.

Of course the prudent thing to do would have been to dispatch the whole lot of them … a sanitized way of saying ‘kill them.’ I found I couldn’t do it, even though I regularly set mouse traps. I couldn’t do it for the simple reason that I looked into her eyes. Creature to creature, we had a moment. 

In reality life comes to us only in moments, and all too often those fleeting seconds get swept away, gobbled up in the dailiness of activity … the doing, doing, doing. But not this time.

Oftentimes I find l am a human doer rather than a human being. I don’t like to think of myself that way. However, if I’m being really honest I have to say that I live as though all the stuff I push around, arrange, clean, buy, store, pass on is my real purpose for being here. Thankfully something happens every now and then launching me into a different reality. I’m given an opportunity to simply be. Like yesterday …

It was incredibly foggy, so thick you could scoop it up with a spoon. And, like magic, all my ‘doing’ relaxed. Happily immersed in a sea of white I was mesmerized. The dense atmosphere muffled all sound and was just other-worldly enough to have me release all thoughts of ‘doing’ and cast my cares into the fog. 

I was catapulted from the land of toil into the land of being.

Suddenly I became aware of small sounds, now audible as the almost impenetrable fog hushed those that are louder and more demanding on our ears. Decaying leaves scratching up against my foot, a vole making it’s way through the underbrush. There was a distant nuthatch chittering high in the trees, the rustle of wings from a bird on high, the soft snow delicately crunching beneath my feet. All around me the subtle, deeper layers of our living earth. 

I would like to think that it wouldn’t take a weather event for me to slow my flurry of ‘things-I-need-to-do.’ Do I have the courage to face into what it is that keeps me running, doing, working myself ragged. Could I let go? Perhaps then I’d spend more of my life simply being … 

Maybe it’s a bit cowardly but I wanted the fog to stay, impose upon me this sheltered cocoon. Then, enveloped in this protective womb I could remain in quiet and avoid dealing with whatever it is that has me running around in circles like the little deer mouse who in fact became a tank pet and ran on a wheel all night long. 

She, ‘Smeasely’, lived to be 3 1/2 years old. She provided hours of ‘dog TV’ for my Border Collie Zoe who was fascinated by the way she would pop out of the tunnels she constructed out of chewed up cardboard and wood shavings. Smeasely would hold and daintily nibble on a seed with her tiny nimble paws. She had shiny brown fur, velvety ears and pure black liquid eyes that looked so utterly fragile. She was just a common little mouse and yet, she was exquisite. Truly a marvel of nature. 

In our modern life we are constantly barraged by the urgent fury of information hurled at us through email, phone calls, texts, TV, pop-up internet ads, all making emphatic demands. We are warned to take action now or miss out. Meet deadlines. Go here, do this. Everywhere voices are screaming for our attention, and action … all consuming our precious time, our moments.

Under normal circumstances we don’t know how long we have on this earth. When our clock winds down, our time stands still. I can’t rely on a foggy day or any other external pressure to connect to the deepest parts of my humanity. I can succumb to the vortex of the madness or find a way within myself to give up what keeps me running on the wheel.