THE WISH LIST
Rex Burress
Nearly everyone has a wish list, or as some say, a bucket list, of fond objectives and adventure desires of all kinds all over the world.
Sometimes the wish is as simple as praying for rain--but be careful of the wording...as we know from the 2017 deluge in California, the wish can get out of hand! Did anyone pray for it to stop raining? There are rain lovers though--mushrooms, flowers, trees, frogs. Yet, it is too much rain when the river flows so full in April that even the tree frog's chorusing-puddles are flooded with ten-feet of overflow.
On John Muir's birthdate of April 21, the river had ravished not only the puddle habitat at the edge, but was over the top of rock island across from the Feather River Nature Center, where the Little Red Tree struggles to survive, showing only the tiptop branch to wave in the water. I wonder if that little pistache lodged in the boulder-crack will survive yet another harrowing winter to flash red leaves again in the autumn? The shrub has been anchored in the precarious spot for at least 25 years. (It survived!)
Most alarming, I didn't see a single bird as most of their thickets had been flooded. It is a tough year when DWR predicts the high flow will be flowing until May. Too much snow in the mountains? Too many rain dances? Do not be greedy in prayer wishes!
I have a story about making wishes. Back in rural days on the Missouri farm when I was about six, I would listen to battery-powered radio programs, and there was one so vivid and scary I was haunted for a week! The “squeaky door show, Inner Sanctum,” featured “The Monkey's Paw” one evening, about a man who had gone to India and purchased a withered monkey's paw said to have magic power as well as a curse. “You are granted three wishes with the paw” it was said.
So one evening the man wished for a million dollars, and a short time later his son was killed in an accident and awarded one million dollars. But the man realized the money was nothing compared to having his son alive, and his second wish was for his son to be alive. There was a knock at the door, and there stood his son, alive, but horribly torn apart by the accident. The man grabbed the monkey's paw and made his last wish--for his son to be back in the grave...and all disappeared, the son, money and the monkey's paw. The story was a classic, written by W. Jacobs in 1902. Radio imagination is more vividly graphic than television.
I was wishing for my bed to be moved away from the foot of the haunted stairway for a long time after that. Oh, Mother was planning on me having the nice bedroom upstairs--across from the scary storage room and next to my nature museum. I quickly disposed of my dried hawk's foot and didn't even try to make a wish on it!
Life is full of wishes. Birthday wishes, get well wishes, and some wish and dream on a star. When Henry David Thoreau went to live alone in a cabin by Walden Pond for two years, he said, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately deep and suck out all the marrow of life.” He also said, “If you have built castles in the air with wishes, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”
The accomplishments made in later years had their origin in the experiences of our youth and in the hope and wishes which were formed before and during our time as students. People admire the person who can artistically organize wishes and thoughts into tangible creations.
“A God Jar is anything you wish it to be, in which you can put your wishes, dreams, problems, prayers. You may want to think of it as a spiritual mailbox.”--Julia Cameron
(“Build for yourself a strong box,/Fasten each part with care,/Fit it with hasp and padlock,/Put all your troubles there./Hide therein all your failures,/And each bitter cup your quaff,/Lock your heartaches within it, then/Sit on the lid and laugh.” --Otis T. Whiting 1955)