Let me be a good animal today

Reading from Monday, November 28, 2011 yoga class

My friend Bev just got back from Florida and was telling me about hermit crabs that she saw while hunting shells on the beach.  It brought to mind the following piece which I just love. 

In Barbara Kingsolver’s book “High Tide in Tucson” and the essay of the same name, she tells the story of Buster, a hermit crab, who was in one of the shells she brought back from the Bahamas for her daughter.  This is what happens when she and her daughter first realized this hermit crab was a stowaway:    

            “The largest, knottiest whelk had begun to move around.  First it extended one long red talon of a leg, tap-tap-tapping like a blind man’s cane…Then came half a dozen more red legs, plus a pair of eyes on stalks, and a purple claw that snapped open and shut in a way that could not mean “We come in Friendship.”   Who could blame this creature?  It had fallen asleep to the sound of the Caribbean tide and awakened on a coffee table in Tucson, Arizona, where the nearest standing water source of any real account was the sewage treatment plant.” 

They gave Buster a terrarium with clean gravel, a small cactus and a big shell with tap water.  All this suited Buster just fine.  Then they noticed he would be still, not moving for days, to the point that they thought he might be dead or depressed.  Then… there were days he went into hyperactivity turning over rocks, dragging around a truly disgusting pork chop bone.  She wondered if Buster might be responding to the moon, but the full moon didn’t shine on either end of the high or low activity.  She remembers when she was a graduate student of animal behavior… reading about animals’ internal clocks.  One study was of intertidal oysters that a researcher scooped up on the coast of Connecticut and moved to a basement lab in Chicago.  It was found that the oysters were responding to high tide in Chicago, even though Chicago has no ocean… the oysters were doing their best, just as Buster was doing his best to the “High Tide in Tucson.”   

She goes on to say:  “In my life I’ve had frightening losses and unfathomable gifts:  A knife in my stomach, the death of an unborn child, sunrise in a rainforest, a stupendous column of blue butterflies rising from a Greek monastery, a car that spontaneously caught fire while I was driving it, the end of a marriage, followed by a year in which I could barely understand how to keep living.  It is the way life goes… you stand your ground… just as I did when I fought off the knife, mourned the lost child, bore witness to the rainforest, claimed the blue butterflies as Holy Spirit, got out of the burning car, survived the divorce by putting one foot in front of the other and taking good care of my child.  On most important occasions, I cannot think HOW to respond, I simply DO.  What does it mean, anyway to be an animal in human clothing?  We carry around these big brains of ours like the crown jewels, but mostly I find that millions of years of evolution have prepared me for one thing only:  to follow internal rhythms.”

She went backpacking in the Eagle Tail Mountains in western Arizona where they warn you to carry enough water to keep you alive until you can find another water source—drink your water while you’re alive, it won’t help later.  She found a “tinaja”… a deep, shaded, hollow in the rock about the size of four or five bathtubs, holding water.  On either side of this natural water tank, two shallow caves in the canyon wall faced each other only a few dozen steps apart.  You could stay here in shady comfort all day… and she did, taking in all that was around her… 2 grinding stones, flint chips and pottery shards, bees humming around the water, red tail hawks flying overhead, bighorn sheep…trying to imagine, that long ago people lived here because this place had all they needed to survive…shelter, food and permanent water.   

“WANT is a thing that unfurls unbidden like fungus, opening large upon itself, stopless, filling the sky.  But NEEDS, from one day to the next, are few enough to fit in a bucket with room enough left to rattle like brittlebush in a dry wind.  For each of us—furred, feathered or skinned alive—the whole earth balances on the single precarious point of our own survival.  In the best of times, I hold in mind the need to care for things beyond the self: poetry, humanity, grace.  In other times, when it seems difficult merely to survive and be happy about it, the condition of my thoughts… is as simple as this:  Let me be a good animal today.”

If you want to read the entire essay, check out the book... it is a great book.  I love Barbara Kingsolver. 

To me...this piece is all about being adaptable... it is the only way to survive and live in this world.  

I found out a few hours before class that a great lady I know in town died the day after Thanksgiving in her sleep.  Miss Chris, as she was affectionately called was bigger than life... with a wonderous laugh and a beautiful smile.  She ran a daycare and school.  She was FABULOUS.  I dedicated my class to her tonight.  She was 62 years old... I thought she was lots younger.  I was trying to remember the last time I saw her... how do you know when you are seeing someone for the last time.  It makes you want to hug everybody you see before they leave.  I hugged all my students tonight.