original kin

Late Tuesday we didn't get to the Econo Lodge to begin our night off until after 2am, so Wednesday's run was a grueling one in the upswing heat following four days' downpour and lapse in training. Near the end I hop=dodged a thin bright green double-S curve drawn across the hot asphalt, and stopped my watch to take a closer look.

Squatting quite close by, I labeled him as snake and he, me as who knows?, but we remained in our poses considering eachother for at least two minutes. His body was clean and his scales shone brightly in the sun. His eyes were fixed on me, but as for his recognition beyond that, I wonder. Was I a possible foe? Just colors and movement? He lay motionless but for the subtle pulsing of what I imagined was the area holding his lungs.

A car turned the corner down the street, and headed in our direction. Torn between averting disaster and involving myself in something not my business, I rose and stepped to the roadside, breath withheld. The vehicle moved to the middle of the road, I think to avoid me, but still missed my new acquaintance. He slithered a bit as the wheels rushed on either side of him, but remained on the road, and relatively still.

Twice more this happened, but the third time the car passed and the snake was flopping and flailing in the road, with an obvious kink in his neck. I started, cringed, and suffered a horrible "oh,no.oh,no" moment, but came nearer to watch the struggle that ensued. Eventually the twitching and gasping for air stopped, and as he lay still I drew closer and stared into his now-red eyes. Another driver passed, but the snake was now straddling the white roadside line; swingAndAMiss. But then the little mouth opened wide, fighting to gain air, and his "chest" slowly expanded and contracted again, and the as he moved a bit, the kink in his neck worked itself into almost the previous perfectshape. Before heading back off again, I tapped his tail end, and he slid off the road into the grass.

Yesterday, the lecture I've been reading supplied the moral of the story:

Then I started to think, when I was watching him flail, that I can't tell him I'm trying to save his life. He won't understand. There's no way I can tell him, "Don't put your tail back on the tape. I just got it off." You know, "Hold still, be patient. It hurts; it's part of something bigger."

Then it dawned on me that there are beings all around us, constantly, trying in the same way. There must be higher beings. It's naïve to think we are the only level of things. We look like little lizards to them. We flail when they try to help us. We think, "They're trying to kill me."

You can't judge events more than people. Events could be designed to strengthen and prepare you for something higher that is so foreign to you that you can in no way be communicated with by those beings, any more than a small lizard can be told to lie still.

-- Geshe Michael Roach, To The Inner Kingdom