Ducks Crossing

I’m sitting in my living room when my cat alerts me that something more interesting than usual is going on outside. She’s perched in her lookout on the living room chair, overlooking the big window above our front yard, but her body language is more pronounced than usual, her tail flipping in agitated jerkiness, her mouth opening and closing rapidly, and her voice an unusually loud and persistent combination mewing-whine.

I look down and see a brown mother duck crossing my yard, with eight baby ducklings following close behind her in a line.

A feeling of terror quickly replaces the wonder and awe that I momentarily felt. It has been raining for two days. We live on a highway. The speed limit outside my house is 35 MPH but people never slow down. Trucks and buses and cars whiz by at all hours of the day, almost relentlessly.

Is this mother duck actually going to lead her ducklings across this highway?

I saw this duck family the other day, in the lake, over at the park that’s just through my back yard and a little beyond. Right now the park is full of RVs and carnival rides, setting up for this weekend’s festival. I can only imagine there’s a little too much activity over there right now for this young duck family, and that the mother must be leading them to the river that’s just beyond my front door highway. They are obviously too little to fly.

For a moment, as I watch her lead them through the yard and then into my neighbor’s yard just to the east, I begin to panic, wondering if I should run out there and try to save them. But suddenly I feel calm, and I realize that I might make things worse. You have to let nature take its course, I say to myself, as I watch the mother duck and all the ducklings disappear down the steep embankment of my neighbor’s yard, which leads right to the highway. You can’t try to save everything. You can’t take that on, I tell myself.

They are out of my view now, and I hold my breath for a moment, wondering if I should wait until I can see them again, and risk seeing the inevitable, or if I should just preemptively protect myself by walking away and assuming that they made it safely to the other side.

I remain at the window. I don’t know why. I need to know.

Suddenly then the mother and ducklings are in view again, the mother just crossing the yellow center line and the last of the ducklings following behind her. Just then a large SUV sounds its horn, and without slowing down, passes dangerously close to the last duckling in the line. Close enough to send the tiny duckling flying head over heels into the other lane, landing upside down, so that I can only see the white of his breast. There is no movement.

But now a car is coming in the opposite direction, directly into the path of the overturned duckling, but the car slows down and for a moment I think the car is going to stop and let him and the rest of the ducklings clear the lane. But the car lingers for only a moment and then keeps going, over the top, but without touching, the overturned duckling.

I hold my breath again for a moment, thinking, little guy, you already got two big breaks and you’re almost to the other side, when finally the overturned duckling gets up, runs to the side of the road to join his siblings, and now traffic has resumed its steady pace as the ducklings waddle up the hill on the other side of the road, all eight safely joining their mother.

Whew.

What a miracle, many times over.

Why am I writing about this?
1) Please SLOW DOWN, and be conscious and present when you’re driving. Nothing in your schedule is important enough to jeopardize or destroy animal or human life.

2) I’m reminded of the story, the duck with a human mind, from Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth. Tolle observes that after two ducks get into a fight they separate and float off in opposite directions. Then they each flap their wings a few times to get rid of the surplus energy that built up during the fight. After flapping their wings they float on peacefully, as if nothing had happened.

However, if the duck had a human mind, it would probably tell itself a story such as the following:

“I can’t believe he just did that. Who does he think he is? The nerve . . . he has absolutely no consideration of others. He thinks he owns this pond. I’m sure he’s already plotting some new way to annoy me. He’s not getting away with it; I’ll show him.”

The lesson we can learn from the ducks is this: flap your wings. That is, let go of the stories you’re telling yourself and return to the only place of power: the present moment.

How does this relate to my duck story? In the past, I would have agonized over this duck crossing situation, perhaps even reacted much differently, carried it with me for days as to what I should have or could have done. Eckhart’s story reminds me that those ducks didn’t sit there telling stories about what they could do or what might happen, or how they might die; they just did what they had to do, and got back up when they got knocked down. They live in the present moment. We all have much to learn from ducks and Eckhart Tolle!

The duck with a human mind, my favorite story from Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth:



Another story from A New Earth, monks on a pilgrimage, which shows how we love to hang on to the past:

A Few Reasons Why I Love Spring...

Our flowering tree

My bleeding hearts

Miniature irises...

Each day, everything is different...the world is coming to life as we speak. Plants that were only nudging their way out of the ground yesterday are an inch or more high today. There is wonder all around us.

Shining My Lantern

I got this idea for a blog while listening to a "Finding Your Spiritual Path" web cast (I've linked to the transcript; the download is a available free in iTunes in the Oprah Soul Series collection). I heard Elizabeth Lesser say the following:

I think of our inner life, our soul, as something we come into life with. It's shining, in our hearts. It's always there with us. But as we go through life, this light, which is in the lantern of who we are, our body and our psyche are this lantern around our soul light, gets covered with layers of soot, layers of conditioning. Let's say you had a really difficult childhood and you're this beautiful light that you came into the world with, the stress of your childhood, the anger you might have built up, the fear, the mistrust, it begins to dull the natural light that is inside of us. So when we say we go on a spiritual path, we're not going somewhere else. We're not going to get something we don't already have. We have to find a way to clean the sides of our lantern.

The four years that have passed since my then 60-year-old mom had a stroke and almost died have been the most difficult, heartbreaking time of my life, but also a period of intense personal growth. Not just for me, but my entire family. I have come to terms with the best and the worst in myself and others. I see that our common struggle is to keep going and yet embrace the unstable, ever changing life we are given. To find the silver lining. Most of all I hope that this is a gesture of gratitude. A means of finding our way in a challenging yet beautiful world.