Saturday, February 28, 2009; mid-afternoon; d 12338 – It’s a warm spring like day, temperatures near 80° F with traffic outside rumbling so incessantly that it has somehow ceased to even be noticed. My wife and my mother are out getting their hair done and will be picking up our granddaughter on their return so I have the place to myself. I’ve been listening to music I recorded off the Internet last October (10-21-08Midnight).
I let one of those little lizards out. I hate to see them get trapped in the house, and they are so hard to catch. They do not do well in the house, and they are awfully fast, always darting off to some dark hiding place before you can shoo them outside. I got this one partially corralled in the kitchen with a newspaper and was coaxing him toward the door when he took off, legs outstretched, head and tail held high like he was running over hot coals, right on under the dining room table.
I figured him to be just another lost cause but then I noticed him hanging on to one of the table chair legs, so I quietly lifted both he and the chair out the back door to deposit him far enough away from the back door so that for him to actually run back through the door would have indicated a determination and intentionality I would not suspect an anole to ever possess. It was so neat seeing the little brown fellow there, alert, standing watch on the edge of his paving stone.
“OK little guy… or girl… you’re free now. Go play.”
I returned the chair to the house and then went back outside. Still there. Exactly the same position I left him as though he were waiting for a proper goodbye from me. Humoring this silly notion I bent down to reach out to him, and he leapt into my hand, in the next instant bounding onto my pajama leg (Saturday afternoon and I was still in my pajamas!).
What happened next was very strange. Feeling him clinging there I was overtaken with a tremendous sense of empathy for this delightful little creature, and just as suddenly, everything else surrounding us in the yard. It all struck me so profoundly. Looking at the trees, creatures tucked away out of sight, the plants, the connectedness, the evolution, the way everything was connected in evolution through genes and chromosomes, he and I were connected by evolution, a common ancestry to the point were our ancestors diverged to go their separate ways, each way leading to us, the lizard and I, the trees and I, but we were all together, family none the less, the way you are with cousins, very literally cousins in this world of shared ancestry. We were all descendants to common ancestors across the expanse of time, all the same here on this little planet, and on this day, all together, like cousins, like family.
This hit me in waves of emotion, this great empathy, waves that felt like grief washing over me so powerfully that it nearly doubled me over each time it hit. Again and again it washed over me, its waves convulsing me to my core every time I contemplated our shared condition, for we were all only here for the briefest of time yet still part of something that went on and on, just as it always had, day after day, year after year, century after century, millennia after millennia, eon after eon. Even the palmetto along the fence and I were connected, sharing a common ancestry, a common past, a common fate, and the trees, so quiet, so perfect, even the tree with its bitter orange fruit and its thorns, the butterfly fluttering along the fence, the mocking bird in the yard beyond looking for something to eat (perhaps my friend), but we were all here, we were all together, and I wept.
The more I understood, the more I wept. I didn’t want to loose them. I didn’t want to see them go. We were all so temporary, so fragile, all made of the same stuff, shared atoms, shared elements, everything one from another, all connected, all temporary, but all from the same place, the same garden, all reincarnations of our predecessors coexisting so many millions of years, each one of them now… gone… gone.
And inside too, like the lizard that had leapt off me out into the immense world of our little backyard, the microbes circulating through my body, living in me, inside, the way they had in everything all this time, each their own little world, each living their own minute existence. And I could not help but think how deeply already I would miss them.
I understand that I should be happy, thinking of my friends, my family… but all I can do is weep at the thought of how we must, each of us, separate. I don’t want to let them go. My family, my cousins, are all about me, under my feet, in the sky, in these dreaming plants and waking creatures, shimmering on this sleeping earth, and I weep at how we live on and on in our ignorance at our separation from each other from birth to death, never once grasping how we are all together, all the same, all alive for a brief moment, before we are all, each gone, again, exactly as all the others that came before us, our dear, dear predecessors, so beautiful, so precious, so unlikely.
I have never seen like this on any day before, not like this, not even those high, toasty, chemical days now many lost decades ago. But what did I know? What could I know all lost in my separation? I cried then as well… but I did not understand. Not like today.
It seems so odd that I weep this way, that I finally see it in this way, emptying out from my center this catharsis of grief of loss and separation, like a drunk wailing for a long lost love that could never be possessed. Today I reveled in it like a carnival ride, thinking perhaps that before today it was only that I was not ready. And it made me wonder, if this is how it is, how could any of us possibly contain it? Knowing all this in this way. Seeing this. Being this. So strange. So beautiful.
I could not help but to be amazed at the wonder that had come into this place. And as close to a prayer as I could ever come, I prayed to my Self. “Come out into my face, into my steps, into my hands. I am not afraid, for soon I will be gone.”
Duality remains, held tight like a prize in a monkey trap. Releasing this, letting go of the desire to stay, feeling the grief connected to the idea of separation, seeing this desire to control that manifests this loss and grief, one lets it go, and laughing, delights in the all.
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