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There are moments in adulthood when something small and inexplicable cuts through the static of your life so cleanly that you feel embarrassed by how much it affects you.

Not because you necessarily believe in signs.

But because there’s some part of you that desperately wants the world to still feel alive.

I was lying still with acupuncture needles in my body when a woodpecker started knocking against the third-story window beside me.

Not pecking at a tree.

The glass.

At first I assumed it was random. Birds fly into windows all the time. But this felt different somehow. It was intentional. It was rhythmic. It was curious.

Knock. Pause.

Knock knock.

Pause.

The acupuncturist had left the room, the lights were low, and I was suspended in that strange state acupuncture creates where your body feels simultaneously heavy and untethered. Not asleep. Not fully awake either. Just still enough to notice things. The unclogging of the Qi pipes #iykyk

And that’s the part that stayed with me.

Still enough to notice.

Modern life is almost perfectly engineered to destroy symbolism. Every moment gets flattened into information. Notifications. Deadlines. Traffic. Streaming queues. Emails. Political outrage. Productivity hacks. Everything explained immediately. Everything categorized before it can mean anything. “Here’s how!” #clickbait

We are rarely quiet long enough for the world to feel enchanted.

But humans have always reached for meaning through interruption.

Birds. Weather. Dreams. Coins found at the exact right moment. Songs arriving on shuffle like an answer to a question we hadn’t fully admitted we were asking.

Not because we’re irrational.

Because we’re relational.

We want to feel spoken to. We want to be seen. We want to be acknowledged.

And lately, I think many of us are starving for that feeling in ways we don’t entirely understand.

The woodpecker stayed at the window for an oddly long time. Long enough that I finally opened my eyes fully and just watched him. Tiny body. Sharp movements. Completely unbothered by the fact that he was three stories above the ground tapping against a pane of glass instead of the tree six inches directly to his left.

It felt absurd.

But sacred.

I realize how dramatic that sounds written down. But I don’t really care.

One of the quiet losses of adulthood is how quickly we learn to mock our own awe before anyone else can.

Everything must now be ironic. Self-aware. Explained away before it can become embarrassing.

But laying there with needles in my arms and legs, staring at this strange little bird insisting upon my attention, I felt something I had not felt in a while:

noticed.

Not by fate, necessarily.

Not by God descending through the ceiling tiles of a wellness clinic in the middle of a weekday.

Just… accompanied.

As if the universe occasionally taps at the glass to remind us we are still inside it.

And maybe meaning is not something we prove.

Maybe meaning is something we allow ourselves to experience.

The older I get, the less interested I am in whether moments like these are “real signs” and the more interested I am in what they awaken in us.

Attention.
Stillness.
Humility.
Wonder.

The woodpecker eventually flew away. Of course he did.

But for a few suspended minutes in a darkened room high above a parking lot, the world felt strangely alive again.

— Find me where intention meets whatever answers back.