The Invitation of
the Lizard
In July I was at Ghost Ranch Conference
Center in New Mexico for the Seminary of the Wild. On the first day, we studied the Wild Earth
and were sent out onto the land. We were
asked to be open to who may come to guide us. I was excited about who I might meet.
Perhaps a great cottonwood would call to me.
Or a raptor of some kind. Or
perhaps even a wolf. As I walked on the
land out behind the building where we were meeting, I looked down and saw a
lizard. Is this my guide? A lizard?
Maybe I was just imagining it, but I
felt a tapping on my shoe and looked down and saw the lizard looking up at me. “You
get me” he seemed to be saying. Okay, a
lizard. I stood there for a while and watched
the lizard as it crawled around on the ground, sticking its head into different
holes, looking for something. He seemed
to be saying, “look down at what is right before you.”
I followed the lizard down the side
of a bank and headed to a small, shallow river.
This river, when its floods, cause great damage at Ghost Ranch. It has washed away trees and cut deep into
the bank. I could see trash lining branches high above the ground. Today it was
a small creek you could step over with one step. Not very special at all. I
wondered if I could find a more impressive body of water elsewhere but that’s
not where I was sent.
I sat on a large boulder alongside
this shallow river. I looked at the mud alongside the bank, some small stones lying
on the ground, ants crawling around. “Not
much to see,” I thought. But I sat and
looked. Soon I felt called to walk down the river to another section. I sat down on a rock next to the river and
looked, continuing the thought of why here.
I looked across the river to the large red, sandy clay embankment. It had been formed by previous floods. “Look.
Look.”
Why look at a big, red, sandy clay
bank? I am at Ghost Ranch. Do you know
the vista that is here? These are the
mountains that Georgia O’Keeffe painted.
All I had to do was turn around, look up and there they were. “Look, not behind you but in front of you and
before you.”
I looked at the embankment, stared
at it. I looked down. More stones and dirt and ants. And small flowers. I had not noticed these flowers before. Very tiny.
I stared at them, noticing their intricacies. They were quite pretty. I
focused on one leaf of a blade of grass. Saw the veins running through the blade
of grass. Fascinating details of creation right here at my feet. I picked up one of the stones and held it in
my hand. It had a beauty all its
own. I watched ants as they moved here
and there in their own world, not paying attention to me. Then a lizard showed up, looked at me and
simply said, “Yes, yes, yes.”
Often, we wonder what we must do to
help Mother Earth. The stress on her is
great – pollution, global warming, broken relationships between her and her
people. We wonder if there is really anything
we can do. Yes, there is. There is much we can do. The first step is simply to look down. See what is right before you. Go out into the outdoors, preferably a wild undomesticated
place and simply look down as you walk.
Stop somewhere along the way and look down. See what is right before you and around
you. Notice the intricacies, the
details, the life right there. Look until
you feel a Yes rising up within you. Allow
a love for what is right before you become a love for all the Earth. Let the immediate become the whole. Let love be
the ground out of which you rise and act.
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