My niece came home one day and said she had had fun playing in a puddle.  It turned out the puddle was the Pacific ocean.

The ocean seems to gather reflections.  How can I sit and stare at the ocean without reflecting.  Even the reflections I see in the ocean draw me in deeper and deeper.  So many shades of blue and green.  So much life thriving, invisible beneath the surface.  Then suddenly the surface parts and a whale rises and its whole body curves through the surface returning to the deep.  All that is left is a smooth patch of water.

Sometimes thoughts are like that, breaking through the surface and then curving back to the deep recesses again and all that is left is a smooth patch and a sense of something now gone.

Hummingbirds are territorial.  While in Puerto Vallarta we watched hummingbirds using a feeder on the next balcony.  These have to be some of the most aggressive and hyper birds in the world!  They were continually fighting for or defending the bird feeder territory.  there were at least six perches and feeding holes on the feeder – but one bird would claim the whole feeder until chased away by another bird.  Lot’s of zips and buzzing complaints.

I realize that hummingbirds need to defend their natural territory to ensure there are enough plants providing nectar for survival.  But the feeder was always full – there was more than enough for fifty hummingbirds! Of course they didn’t understand this.

I thought, “what a shame they don’t realize there is more than enough to share, and instead waste so much energy defending their supply and territory.  If only they realized they would need even less of the nectar if they didn’t spend so much energy on defending their stuff”.

It wasn’t a big leap from that thought to realizing how much human energy and resources are wasted in defending our territory, our power, our stuff. God has given us an abundant world with more than enough resources for every person on earth to live a healthy and peaceful life.

How do we turn the world right-side up.  As Bishop Lino of Guadalajara said recently “You don’t change the world by changing human minds, you change the world by changing human hearts”.