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LIZARD LESSON AND CRAB FISH LUNCH
Thursday Apr. 2, 2015
Long familiar Kihei/Wailea beach walk yesterday.
One I’ve done so many times – seemed so different.
First, it wasn’t first-light/low tide.
Mid-day, physically, a different beach.
Where I normally walk was deep under water.
Second, people density. ‘High season-full’.
Not my usual beach.
On return leg, resting on some stairs, I noticed a darting lizard.
Until it saw me.
Still, nervous, motionless (me, not the lizard) I watched. It snapped up a bug. Tiny bug, but so was that lizard. Easily equal to lizard’s head. I imagined that tiny lizard-brain debating, whether to risk dropping it while running or swallow whole. Body motionless, eyes scanning surroundings – imagining its risk/reward calculus, needing food (other than making more lizards, what do lizards do?), risk of sitting still …
Swallowed. Whole. As we all might, if we’d evolved without hinged jaws.
As that lizard scooted to a rock crevice to sleep off its big meal, I wondered if that tiny brain would ever have self-doubt about biting off something large. Humans do that all the time – we debate, re-debate, we doubt, re-doubt, vulnerable, sitting still, doing nothing but worry …
Lizard contains a lesson.
Like those tidal pools. Tiny fish, trapped till tide comes to wave them out. Fish bowl microcosm of ocean life.
Several sizes, colours, varieties – fish competing for same food, wary of bigger fish, bigger fish wary that stopping to bite off something large would slow them down, make them vulnerable.
That hungry bigger fish cruised by, hesitated at rocky edge of that pool, a crab claw lunged out to end that fish’s hesitation.
Lizard taught its lesson.
Crab had fish for lunch.
Mark Kolke
column written/ published from Paia, Maui, HI
morning walk: 18C/64F, nearly cloudless, calm, shopkeepers sweeping debris from streets as sleepy-town wakes up to greet this day while my home-world is stopping for lunch; my breakfast is a warm apple/macadamia nut strudel from Moana Bakery …
Reader feedback:
THERE MIGHT BE ELEPHANTS
Hi Mark, I agree with you Mark. Some days we should just spend our time daydreaming. Pick a day, to day… tomorrow? Do you need to schedule the day and block it in your calendar? Whatever we do, we need to “just” do it. For some reason, we as adults with busy lives and commitments, are not setting time aside to just use our imagination. “Imagination is the eye of the soul”, a quote by Joseph Joubert, Pensées rings true. How else do we get back in touch with ourselves and what is truly meaningful to us, DK, Edmonton, AB
Good one, AN, Calgary, AB
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