Seeing the Strangers

This morning, I came across a baby raccoon just outside my backyard. The animal was busy trying to climb a tree and must have spotted me before I did spot it, because it seemed to freeze while it was climbing the tree. And it gazed at me for a while in this frozen silence while I tried to wave at it--as though "hello" were somehow a universal language that all species intuitively understand. Still, I had some kind of notion that connecting can happen even when there isn't a shared language that is used o connect.
   Many traditions talk about the inherent interconnection between all living beings, and how prayers can form connections based on faith in the mind's already connected nature. I find it difficult to feel this way with other people, however, because a lot of times there are ample opportunities for miscommunication there. With animals or non-human species in general, there isn't so much confusion with regards to what one is seeing, and the viewer has no demands placed on them as to how to interpret and act upon what they are seeing. Of course, if the situation were a life or death flight from a tiger, say, this principle would no longer apply.
  I mentioned in an earlier blog entry how simple connections with nature can sometimes reveal patterns in our thinking or symbolic elements of our lives. Natural "visitations" from unusual species can sometimes give me pause to consider whether the animals are special messengers of sorts who have come to deliver a teaching about soul. I have often wondered, for example, why there have been so many rabbit sightings in Toronto, when it seems like the last place one would go to, to find a live rabbit, much less a wide patch of grass upon which to graze. Sometimes the answer is quite simply that these visitations are the stranger in us awakening and being heard: something telling us that we don't know ourselves as much as we think we did, and we had better slow down to pay attention to those mysterious parts of us that have no voice as of yet. Perhaps this is the aspect that allows me to connect the visiting strangers with my inner stranger.