How to find four-leaf clovers

Lucky Lunch Stroll
Photo by Amy Reed on Unsplash

Ever find a
dollar in a pocket while sorting laundry? It always seems like free money. I
don’t know why I’m surprised–I put it there. But I still say, “Thank you, God,”
or sometimes just “Woo-hoo!”

You might
know someone who found larger amounts in the backs of drawers, old purses,
accounts they forgot they had opened. The money was there all along. We just
didn’t see it.

Usually
that’s because we didn’t look for it. You tend to look for things only when you
expect to find something.

Otherwise,
you become like the man in the old fable who looked for his lost ring under a
street lamp. A passerby asked if he was sure he had lost it in that spot. The
man replied, “No, I lost it over there. But the light is better here, so I’m
looking for it here.”

It’s a
joke, but we all do that at times, lookin’ for love, or money, or a job, or a
friend, or happiness, in all the wrong places.

Only to
find it was in our pocket the whole time.

Years ago,
my student, Jennifer, taught me a lesson about looking and finding. A devout
Christian, she never made errors in grammar or spelling in her essays, not once
the entire semester. I asked her about it. At first she said something about
having a good teacher in middle school, which I’m sure she did.

But I
suspected there was more, so I waited for the rest of the answer. She shyly
told me–she said everything shyly in class, though her points were insightful
and often bold–”the Bible says, ‘In the beginning was the Word,’ so I try to
use words with care.” Amen.

She added,
“that’s why I like your class.” I was about to say something about Logos, the
Word in 1 John, and its similarity to the Vedic Om, but she turned on
her heel and walked away.

A few weeks
later, I was preparing a lecture about serendipity in writing, the way that the
writing process can surprise us with insights we didn’t even know we had in
us. 

I flipped
through books for ideas. One was an 1854 King James Bible I bought one summer
for fifty cents at a library book sale in Saratoga Springs, New York. It was
signed by an Elizabeth Gilbert, whose handwriting suggested she was a little
girl. Maybe it was her first very-own book.

Tucked into
it was a small ticket from one of those old machines that gave you your weight
and a fortune. This pale blue cardboard ticket said little Elizabeth weighed
all of 62 pounds. The Bible verse on its back sent me to another page,
different from the one she had marked.

And there
they were between pages of the New Testament: two four-leaf clovers pressed in,
presumably, more than a century before and now pale as paper. “Ask and ye shall
receive,” I read. “Seek and ye shall find.” (Matthew 7:7) I had found my
lecture.

How
dramatic it would be, I thought, to tell my students about looking for a
passage on seeking and finding only to find Elizabeth Gilbert’s four-leaf
clovers. And what about Elizabeth’s unusual luck in finding two?

It was a
sunny Spring afternoon so we had class on the grass under a large, branching
live oak. I spoke with enthusiasm, ending with the dramatic (I
thought) question, “How many of us find even one four-leaf clover, let
alone two!”

And yet, I
concluded, playing professor for all it was worth, it’s important to trust in
the process and keep creating, even if we never find our own four-leaf clovers.

A nice
lesson, I thought, about perseverance and faith. A very nice lesson.

Some of the
students even told me after class that they agreed. I was nicely puffed up.
Then up came Jennifer after the others had gone, to hand me a freshly-plucked,
bright green four-leaf clover.

“Whe-when
did you find this?” I asked.

“Just now,
during class,” she said.

She had
hardly moved. She was her typical quiet, attentive self.

“You mean
you just–” and I made a motion of reaching down and plucking something from in
front of me.

“Yeah,” she
said.

“That’s
amazing!” I said. “I mean, what are the chances of that happening here and now?
That’s just amazing.” I repeated.

“Not
really,” said Jennifer. “People don’t expect to find four-leaf clovers, so they
don’t look for them. They’re there.” The way she said it sounded almost like
she was consoling me, “There, there…”

She turned on her heel and walked off, leaving me with my mouth open.

I think of Jennifer’s four-leaf clover in moments when I suddenly remember that I am a
divine soul–not my body, not my thoughts, not my beliefs, not anything about me
that changes. A flicker of grace and there it is, like a single sunbeam on a
cloudy day: my true Self is changeless, never born, never dying, conscious and
undismayed.

It’s there within me all the time. But I forget to look for it and get surprised by this
truest of truths.

So now I have three four-leaf clovers tucked between those pages, two white and one
green, reminding me to ask and I’ll receive, reminding me to seek and I will
find. I still haven’t found a four-leaf clover, but I do look.

In looking,
I’ve come to love bees and became aware of the massive
drop in the honeybee population
 . It endangers our food supply, but we
don’t expect such a thing to happen, so we don’t see it happening all around
us.

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