You know how it is when you are talking to the universe and realize that it isn’t listening? Or maybe you don’t. Maybe I just think I am talking to it because I haven’t got anything better to do. So I asked the universe how it was that it never had a hair out of place and at first it looked at me like it was going to say something, but then it didn’t.

I listened intently. Leaves were falling and crash landing on my deck. Cedar boards were being strafed with leaves of all sorts. The wind was shimmying the ones that had not yet fallen and I wondered if they would be happy drifting to their death.

I felt a sense of destiny about it all. I had made it this far; maybe my own downward drift would be easy like a leaf. Right before my husband drew his last breath, a French door blew open in his hospice room and a leaf flew in and landed at the foot of his bed. An omen of destiny that I still have.

Destiny is what takes the pressure off of us. Why try so hard when we get outvoted by the universe every time? Not to say we are not an integral part of the plan, because we are. Every hair of our head is numbered; hence my saying the universe never has a hair out of place.

Even in tsunamis and earthquakes, forest fires and sinkholes, the universe is in full control. We don’t have to do a thing. So I don’t know why I sometimes strike up a conversation with it. But I do know why the universe never acts interested. It knows better than to talk to itself.

Vicki Woodyard