Egyptian Goose : The Wonder of Attention

This is an Egyptian Goose. This wonderful bird was exploring my park’s big meadow where people run their dogs and chitchat over coffee. This is an exceptional beast: its colors, its size, its non-residence here all place it well outside the realm of ordinary experience for the people at the park. As I stood there photographing it, marveling at it, savoring the opportunity to be in the presence of something so extra-ordinary, I couldn’t help but also notice the people passing me by, entirely uncaring and seemingly oblivious to what was in front of them.

Judaism is in many ways a set of practices intended to inculcate the habits of awareness and conscious intention. From the most (seemingly) mundane: how we eat and drink, to the most esoteric: wearing phylacteries and also periodically touching them, the actions we take are prescribed to remind us of the blessings we constantly experience and our reciprocal duty of acknowledgement. Life is certainly lived within guidelines but is never allowed to stagnate into ruts. On the contrary, our wide-eyed awareness should be our defining characteristic.

Accusations that others are living their lives “the wrong way,” are almost never helpful and so often detrimental. So much more valuable is the approach of Isaiah, invoking model behavior from the “light unto the nations.” Attention to the bounty all around us - true attention - inherently leads to an appreciative life. And a life brimming with gratitude can only, inevitably, be an enviably rich experience. So maybe as I gawked, wondering about this Goose, someone stared at me - and they too wondered just a bit.