Woodchucks are cute, but most farmers hate them because they will eat anything and everything (except they really don’t eat or chuck wood). Farm gardens are like heaven to a woodchuck – especially a garden growing sweet fruit like watermelon. But woodchucks face a dilemma: their mouths are small and their teeth are big and it is hard for them to bite into thick watermelon rinds. So, instead they use their claws to scratch at the softest part of the watermelon, the middle, until it breaks open. Then they take big bites and leave a big mess.
A farmer friend grows watermelons and hates woodchucks. Every year he spends hours looking at seed catalogs to choose “the best” seeds. He nurtures them in an indoor greenhouse before transplanting them into his outdoor garden around which he’s built an elaborate fence to keep out rabbits, deer, and woodchucks. But woodchucks have a special talent for burrowing under fences. Woodchucks really irritate my friend.
Yet he is also a student of A Course In Miracles and enough of a philosopher to realize that woodchucks, just like all of us, are simply burrowing under fences to gather what they think is their treasure. Like us, they scratch at the parts that are easiest to get to.
In the Text we are told we don’t have to work through every example of irritation that crops up in our lives as long as we are “willing to regard them, not as separate, but as different manifestations of the same idea…” FIP-T-15, X, 5:3
I guess that means that if anything has been eating your watermelons lately, and if practicing forgiveness on a particular human being is proving difficult, it can be just as effective to start with the woodchuck.
How Much Wood Could a Woodchuck Chuck?
