Cock And Bull

• All Of God’s Creatures

  Posted: November 29, 2011, 11:33 am by Administrator

  My apartment is on the second floor and when I opened the door to the balcony after I got out of bed, I was greeted by a sunny morning spiced up with the fragrance of the fresh of a green earth after a week of heavy rain. While moving my head in order to harvest a great lungful of crisp air from all around the space on which I was standing, my eyes glanced on the wall and I say a slug. The slug had a shiny cream color and was extended full length as if it was about to make a huge lunge forward, making me think of a steeplechase runner in full stride whose pose has been frozen when the viewer pressed the pause button on the remote control. And as I waited for the slug to make a contraction to facilitate forward movement, I once again wondered about the journey of the slug.

  I wondered how much time it had taken the slug to move from the ground and climb the wall – all the way to the second floor. Given the slow speed at which a slug moves, and considering a slug’s life expectancy, I suppose that it must have invested a considerable chunk of its lifetime to accomplish this one task of climbing the wall. One might even conclude that climbing this particular wall is probably this slug’s lifetime achievement. Which then brings us to the next obvious question, “for what purpose?”

  I suppose this question brings us to our own predicament as human beings. When we do not understand the meaning of our lives, we feel like this slug, climbing a mundane wall all its life. And at that time, for all the work that we have engaged in, we look back and see the lack of color in our accomplishments and ask “for what purpose?”

  When I look at the slug, I cannot understand why it chose to climb this wall or why it had to leave the lush world of food and the companionship of other slugs down below. But then when I look a second time, I realize that this particular slug has touched my life: It caught my attention and has engaged my imagination for quite a considerable amount of time. In that time, it has enabled me to examine my own life and given me the words with which to write a story to share with you. Considering that this writing will affect you in some way, you can already see the chain reaction that the slug has set off?

  We can say in jest that this slug has accomplish in 30 minutes what my school English teacher tried to accomplish for years every day that she walked into my class. But in all seriousness it probably helps us to remember that it is indeed true that all God’s creatures – You and I included – have a reason to be.

  We Matter. Despite, all of our good intentions that seem too small to us and inconsequential to the universe, all the menial tasks that only seem to serve as placeholders for the existence that we hold, all the tumultuous experiences that do not seem to make any sense at all, all the places that we find ourselves so deeply buried in and that we can never seem to be able to retrace our steps from. We Matter.

Blah blah blah

Fish cakes

Alas a fish cake.

Yet more fish cakes

Guess what ... yeah ... fish cakes.

The end of the fish cakes