Banana slug

I had a colonoscopy yesterday. The day before the procedure, I walked out to the car and almost stepped on the longest banana slug I’d seen. And I’ve seen a lot.

This slug was so attenuated I almost mistook it for a branch from my apple tree. I watched it for a while and noticed how it’s one muscle moving forward by what looks like peristaltic action. Like, guess what, my colon.

So I’m doing my Darwin thing, thinking about how I, a human was nothing but a slug wrapped in human form. Mother Nature or evolution or something decided let’s speed this dude up a bit. Let’s give him legs and arms and a brain to run the whole shebang and see what happens. I happened, albeit without the little antennae and with a chin. Slugs don’t have chins.

Slugs are a gastropod and they are slow movers. 6 1/2 inches per minute. They have one lung, one foot, and no spine. Their foot produces muscular contractions which propel this little beast if propel is the right word for such a ssslllooowww fellow. He gets there in the end.

And I got there, in the end.

A Promise

It’s so strange how bits of your past life suddenly show up again. Actually, that’s not accurate. A bit of my mother’s past life showed up-an amulet of heavy paper or cloth. It’s been handled so much that it’s soft and pliable. I found it in an odds-and-ends pot.

It’s oval, pinked on the edge, with a loop for hanging. A cross, a crown of thorns, and a heart adorn this scrap with the words “apostleship of prayer in league with the sacred heart.”

I bet my mom got this memento as a pledge to pray daily. I know she did. She prayed for all of us.

I was going to write this piece about the curious juxtaposition of the word league with faith and prayer, but I’ve changed my mind. I don’t feel any desire to make fun of something as serious, truly serious, as prayer.

My mom was a believer in prayer. I don’t know if she prayed for things; she prayed as an exercise of hope. She prayed to feel that someone was walking by her side. She prayed because we are all helpless before our fates.

I understand this. In the worst days of Kate’s illness, I prayed. I’ve never prayed so hard as I did then. I couldn’t change anything but I could pray, with intention and intensity. I needed someone by my side to hold me up.

I can’t dismiss this. I can’t disown this. I didn’t want to join in a league with the sacred heart which sounds like a club with a plan. I didn’t want to be alone with my bleeding heart.

Did it work? I don’t know. It comforted me. It allowed me to be with my grief feeling as though I shared it with someone. It allowed me to contemplate the mystery.

The mystery of what, you ask. The mystery of life and death and faith and hope and this goddamn world that wants to rub your face in your inadequacies, your arrogance, your foolishness.

The mystery of it all.

************

Speaking of the mystery of it all, I just went on google images and found a sacred heart image and so much more. It doesn’t look like my amulet and it is called the digital download of the sacred heart. Somehow, that seems wrong, just wrong.

The Fifth Day of Creation

I just finished reading a wonderful piece about Escher and his inspiration from Bach—musical forms, repetition, and waves of sound, and Rachal Carson. Escher made art like music. It moves, it flows, it astonishes and delights.

It speaks to me of an underlying form, a never ending process that is complete at any point in time. I suppose some might call that process god or nature. I don’t care what it’s called. It is sustainable.

I think of motion as frenetic often, rushed, This is not that. This is movement as a tree bends in the wind, as a chant or a prayer, as waves on the shore. This is intrinsic motion.

It is as if I am in the sea’s arms being gently rocked in an ocean of time. You will end it says, but I will go on. I am timeless.

These arms support us all, not as individuals but as the universal human. You will die but we go on.

In this time of global impermanence and upheaval, nature goes on. It goes on.

We are a boat in the ocean.

Just one more example of Escher’s art: