See the Moose
My husband and I met seven summers ago in the Green Mountains of Vermont. It was there that we fell in love while attending graduate school. At the time, Nick lived in Vermont. When summer school ended, I headed to a year of graduate school at Harvard, but returned to the Vermont cabin every weekend where our lives wove together in a log cabin deep in the woods and bogs surrounded by nature and wildlife. We knew there were Moose around, lots of them, but in five years of summers spent in Vermont, neither of us had encountered any.
As the year progressed, we would find ourselves presented with many decisions about moving, jobs and taking big steps into our future. We were deluged with decisions which would change the course of our lives together forever. As we navigated through all the options, we questioned whether or not the right opportunity would come to us, and how we would know when it did—there were so many possibilities. Sometimes we were riddled with doubt that we would end up getting on the path that was right for us.
As we contemplated all this, walking in the woods, we also spoke a lot about seeing a moose—we saw tracks and sometimes, crossing the road, we knew we had just missed it. It was not long before we realized something magic. We likened our life's decision-making to seeing the moose. And "See the Moose" became our metaphor and our guiding idea in our lives. You see, we knew the moose was out there, that was for certain. And we knew the moose was a magnificant and wonderful thing to behold!
And if we were just patient, and if we were alert and aware and if we concentrated, and if we had certainty that eventually it would happen, and if we believed in the moose, then, we were bound to see it. It was this idea that we applied to sighting the moose and then transfered to our lives. When we looked for jobs, we spoke of "seeing the moose;" when we wanted to find a special dog, we spoke of seeing the moose. The moose has become a real symbol of faith for us...and guess what, we see moose everywhere. We now live in Florida, and of few moose, but we also like the beach, and the metaphor of the moose is everywhere. We wanted to find a cabin in the woods to call our own...getting back to roots and soul of our relationship. The day before we went to North Carolina to look for the cabin, Nick found a plastic toy moose on the sidewalk. We agreed it was a sign. Then, once in North Carolina, we began looking for cabins and there was this one we walked into and it felt right and perfect, and then we looked around and the peole had moose stuff all over the house, the house was priced exactly right and was just what we were looking for. There are not real moose in North Carolina. But we "saw the moose" there.
The cabin would have been perfect without the moose motif. That was just a further sign. Next thing I found [Mooseworld]. We live by the faith and the motto, believe the moose is out there, want to see it and you will see the moose. We see the moose (metaphorically) all the time as our life unfolds.
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*Jenifer Fox is a high school principal who has shared the moose metaphor with her students.
