Creature Comfort

Today I went across the street to explore a swamp where I used to play in my childhood. The dry bed of the swamp, usually home to about a foot of murky water, was testimony to the low rainfall of recent months. I walked over the spongy, black humus, never sinking more than an inch or two into the damp ground. Clear afternoon sunlight poured into the dry swamp, lighting up old, fallen trees and the earliest autumn leaves turning subtly from green to yellow and orange.



I was wondering about the creatures that occupied this wetland when it was full of water and what they might be doing now that it had dried up. Then I heard what that sounded like thousands of wet tadpoles writhing in the mud, gasping for water. And that's what I found. It was fascinating and heartbreaking to watch them suffering, and I felt an urgent need to do something, to help them. I picked up a handful of those that were still wiggling and rushed them back home to put them in a bucket of water. They furiously swam about and then died because the water was way too cold for them. Does that make me a murderer? Disheartened, I took a break and wondered what to do.



Plan B: I would transport them from the swamp across the road to the swamp down below our house and hope they wouldn't mind a drop in elevation of about 100 feet. I found that some in my earlier bucket of dead tadpoles had miraculously been revived, and I immediately set off into the lower wetland. Before long I was traipsing through a similarly dry swamp, but this time through dense brush, small trees, and any number of stinging, poisonous plants. The tadpoles weren't looking good after being sloshed around for 30 minutes as I sought out a watery shelter for them. I finally found a place, released them, and felt a mix of satisfaction at having done something great and regret that I couldn't have been more gentle. I was plagued by the immensity of the problem as I realized that I would need many buckets and many difficult trips walking through forest and mud to save the remaining tadpoles.

I sat down in the yard behind my parents' house to pick burs out of my clothes and I saw a red-bellied woodpecker sitting inside our fence. When I walked out of the house it was startled and gave a small bark, whereupon I suspected it would fly away. But it didn't. It just sat there, just like an injured bird. Again, I immediately went into savior mode and stepped toward the bird to administer first aid. But then I stopped. I decided to just pick burs and watch the bird. As I picked and watched, it occasionally called out to other red-bellies in the surrounding trees, and they called back. I felt sorry for it.



Then I noticed a small yellow spider crawling on my right hand. I had never seen one that looked quite like it, so I leaned in for a closer look. It had four legs on its left side and only one front leg on the right. How bizarre, I thought. It must have lost the other three in a gruesome battle. Then I aided the little spider in its descent to the grass, took a peak at the bird that hadn't moved, and pulled out a few more burs. The bird suddenly flew up into the air, into the forest, out of the trees, all the way around our house, and then back into the forest. I could hear it celebrating with friends and family.

The spider came back. It was unmistakably the same spider. Four legs on the left and one on the right. It crawled all the way up the chair, up my shirt, and back onto my right hand. OK. What are you trying to tell me? I strongly believe in the Law of Attraction: every moment of every day I will attract into my life the people, creatures, and situations that I need to help me heal, grow, and learn more about Divine truth and love and about myself. And that is what I want more than just about anything. What can I possibly do for these animals? What can I do for a tadpole, a woodpecker or a 5 legged spider? The spider had moved to my left hand, attached a small strand of web to my finger, and began to dangle in the wind. Before I could stop it, the spider released himself and flew away, out into the yard.

I began to cry. The grief was unrelated to the animals. It was about pain that I've been carrying with me since childhood. It was the feeling that there was no trust and no love in my family. Mixed into that pain was the realization that nearly everyone in this world, probably everyone on my street, and in the communities around me, everyone I know is suffering. And what can I do but cry? The sun had found a new, lower position in the afternoon sky when I finally felt that I had let go of some small part of this grief. I felt a new peace with my suffering and with the suffering of the world. It's not my job to save anyone or any creature. I saw that the lives of the animals crossed my path today in order to teach me a couple of lessons. The first was from the suffering tadpoles writhing and gasping in the drying mud: we are the same. You are suffering just like us. Why do you think you can save us? My desire to save is rooted in my discomfort with suffering. I don't want to allow suffering and I have been so arrogant as to believe that I could do something to stop it. The truth is, I believe, that I cannot heal anyone or anything else until I've healed myself.

To believe that I can save someone is to perpetuate the disempowering belief that they need to be saved. To put the bird or the spider in a box would be to limit their opportunities to experience life. Clearly, both were entirely capable of taking care of themselves and of teaching me a valuable lesson. I don't know what will happen to the tadpoles, but I've observed that life has a way of balancing itself out. I pray that I can continue to observe it with enough patience that I might eventually be able to achieve some balance in my own life.

PS: I didn't take the bird photo. I just took it from somebody's website. Thank you somebody.

Two August Tenths

Dictionary.com says that august means, "inspiring reverence or admiration; of supreme dignity or grandeur; majestic" I've recently come to believe in god, and I think august is an appropriate word to describe a little bit of what god must be. But this isn't a post about divine fractions.

I'm at Brigham Young University in Hawaii. Yesterday, after an amazing flight from Melbourne, Australia, to Sydney, and then to Honolulu, I arrived in my country's only island state. I left early in the morning on August 10th and I arrived early in the morning on August 10th. That's not a typo; it's just what happens when you cross the international date line. I'd never done that before, and the experience was a mixed bag.

My first 10th was extraordinary. I woke up early on a rainy Melbourne morning, packed my bags, had a big raw breakfast of grated and chopped apples, sliced bananas, cinnamon, and soaked chia seeds all over a big bed of green lettuce and celery. That's what I've been eating just about every morning. Then I went to the train station to do some busking. Here's what Dictionary.com says about busking:
1.Chiefly British . to entertain by dancing, singing, or reciting on the street or in a public place.
2. Canadian . to make a showy or noisy appeal.

I was doing the British version with my flute. On the way to the train station I knew that I would walk by a special house in the suburban neighborhood of Caulfield. The house was special because right out in the front yard there was a little orange tree that was dripping with beautiful, ripe oranges. The grass in the small front yard was long and there wasn't a path from the house to the tree, indicating to me that no one was taking advantage of this fruity bounty. I had been wanting some of those oranges for two full days, on and off. I stopped in the drizzling rain, looked at the oranges, contemplated hopping over the knee high brick fence and grabbing a few. But that brought up some moral questions. It would be stealing. I believe that stealing is wrong.

What was stopping me from going up to the door, knocking, and asking if the owner minded if I picked a few off the tree? Nothing but a small fear of a word that has taken on an unnatural importance in my mind: NO. I didn't want to hear that word. But, the truth is, the owner of that tree had every right to tell me no and I would have no right to be upset with him if he did. Once I had that worked out, I rang the doorbell, asked the grumpy old man who answered if I could pick a few oranges, and he said...."Yeah, OK." Haha! Victory! Honestly acquired, fresh, nutritious vegan pirate treasure. Lately, I've been going mad for fruit and vegetables. I hesitate to eat anything else.

Anyway, busking. I walked into the train pedestrian tunnel, opened my green cotton satchel up in a way that would, I hoped, invite many gold coins to be tossed in it, and placed the oranges artistically around its corduroy perimeter. Then I began playing a mix of Nepali folk tunes and a few little devotional ditties that I've created myself, and I smiled with my eyes at the commuters, students, and other folks who walked through that music filled tunnel. The fact that it was cold and raining usually seems to deter people from sharing their hard-earned money with vagabond flute players, but some kind of magic was happening in the Caulfield Train Station's Pedestrian Tunnel on the morning of August 10th (the first August 10th).

Forty five minutes later, when my fingers were aching with cold, I decided to close up shop (my bag) and hopped on the train to Southern Cross Station with an extra $16. Not bad for a quick day's work. From there, the bounty of August 10th continued to increase geometrically as I received love, food, friends, and veritable "get out of jail free cards" at every turn. I could do no wrong and every person, place, and thing in the universe was conspiring not only to make my life easy, but to make it downright joyful.

That was, of course, until I flew into my second August 10th.

My second August 10th landed me in Honolulu International Airport. I felt strange, sleep deprived, too hot in the humid, tropical air, and confused about what to do and where to go.