I thought about tossing it onto some bare ground where it might reverse its exodus and burrow back into the soil, but the cold didn't look like it was going to break today.
I wondered if it was dead.
And then my little box of spring on my
kitchen windowsill materialized in my mind, and I decided to bring
the worm home.
Will it come to life in my box? Or
will it just lay there? What if it is
dead? Will it dry up, or will it decompose?
Looking
down at it lying in the palm of my black mitten, the worm as I
experience it has all those possible realities in it now, and more.
For example, I could drop it on the road home and a car could flatten
it. Or it could warm up and thrive in my box, get tossed back into
the woods in May, and become a happy worm-father to new worms. But
instead of predicting what will likely happen and in essence choosing
one or two lines of possibility for the worm, I am going to try to
just stay in this moment.
Like
my moment in the Christmas kitchen (see Simultaneous
Realities I and II), I think
realities can exist side-by-side. But I see now there are more than
dual realities. It's like every moment is a seed, and all the
realities of that seed's existence – from the flower and the pollen
that generated it, to its demise as a root breaks out and down while
a sprout cracks through and pushes up – all those realities are in
that seed. At once.
So I
will watch the worm in my terrarium, and practice seeing it just as
it is in its infiniteness. And as hard as it is to push outside my
own shell of thinking in mono- or dual- realities, maybe my own nut
will crack, and a new way of perceiving will take root.
I am
feeling grateful to the worm, the January thaw, and my box of spring:
multiple simultaneous realities right here, right now.