universe Archives | Deborah Hawkins

I was sitting at the vet’s office this morning, waiting for Summer Moon’s appointment for her second puppy shot. She’s been home since September 11, and Rhythm and I have been adjusting to being a two-retriever household again.

The vet’s office has glass doors on all the exam rooms; and across the waiting room, I could see a woman bending over a dog, lying on the exam table. She was obviously waiting for the vet to come in. But more than that, the angle of her body and the way she held her dog, told me that she was pouring out all the love and comfort she had on a seriously ill pet. My heart ached. That was me, back in May, holding Melody, my twelve-year-old Golden Retriever, and telling the Universe not to take her. Please, please, please. Not my Melody. Not now. Not yet. Not ever. Please.

Melody

Well, I lost that round. Obviously. And, as I sat watching the woman on the other side of the glass and sending her all my love and prayers, I also thanked the Universe for starting me on another journey with a new, beloved pet.

Summer Moon

But then it hit me. Hard, and then harder. Love is still who we are, really. Fundamentally. At our core. We love each other. We love our pets. We love the small moments that make life wonderful and magical. A sunny day. The first hint of autumn. A vermillion leaf on the sidewalk. A rainy day and a cup of hot tea with honey. The smile of a husband or a wife or a child. We love on in the face of loss. We love unconditionally. We are champions at love.

As I sat in the vet’s waiting room, I realized that I was looking at love through the glass door where the woman stood over the table, holding her dog. There are terrible people in the world who do terrible things. We’ve seen that yet again this week. But the black souls among us cannot change the true meaning of US, which is love.

I didn’t see the lady and her dog when we came out of the exam room after Summer’s checkup. But I hope the vet sent her home with good news. I was grateful for the moment when I’d seen her behind the glass and realized that love is truly the driving force inside us. Love, I told myself as I left with the exuberant new life the Universe has entrusted to me. Love. Focus, focus, focus.

I spent the day yesterday as a cock-eyed optimist. The optimist part was deliberate. The cock-eyed part was not.
I wear different contacts in my left and right eyes. My right eye is corrected for distance. My left eye does the heavy lifting up close. Yesterday morning I switched lenses. Oops.
Now, I’ve done this before. The little packages of disposable lens all look the same – particularly when I don’t have my glasses on. If I squint, I can see the 3.50 power that goes in the left eye and deduce that the remaining 1.25 goes in the right. But yesterday, I was rushing to get started on work, and I didn’t bother to squint. So I slapped the wrong lens in the wrong eye. And I didn’t notice my mistake for a quite long time.
Well, that’s not true. I knew at once my eyes felt strange. But I attributed it to dry-eye because I’d spent a long day the day before at the computer writing a brief, but complicated, brief for the California Supreme Court. (Yes, I did just use the world “brief” twice in the same sentence, once as a adjective and once as a verb.) So to counteract my “dry eye,” I grabbed the bottled water and started drinking. Pretty soon, I was counting the birds on the wall paper in the bathroom and wondering why my eyes still felt weird.
It was not until I walked into FedEx to leave my brief to be copied and bound around two p.m. that I realized my distance eye wasn’t working and my near eye wasn’t reading fine print. It felt weird, and the world looked weird, too. All at once too bright and too sharp but oddly fuzzy around the edges.
I was supposed to go to Costco for a major munch through of food samples and to buy household must-haves such as gigantic packages of paper towel and plastic wrap, but I dashed home and relieved my eyes of their cock-eyedness. Whew! Just in time, the world came back into focus when I switched the lenses.
This morning, I was super careful to get the proper lens in the proper eye. But I thought about yesterday. How many times in my life have I rushed to the conclusion I understood something, when in fact, I didn’t have all the information? How many times have I thought a situation was in focus when it wasn’t? Probably not often. I’m pretty cautious when it comes to drawing conclusions because of my professional training. But my eye experience yesterday reminded me that sometimes the universe is telling me to slow down and listen, something needs attention. Next time, I won’t wait all day to rearrange my contacts. And the next time my intuition says listen, I will.

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