When I was a girl, I was raised by a lake. I would explore the shores for hours on end with the most excellent company of our family dog. Pookie was a beautiful long eared multicolored mutt of cocker spaniel and dachshund heritage. She and I would wade in the shallows together to watch the minnows dart for cover, truly invisible until they started to move.
With Pookie under strict instruction to stay behind and wait, we’d poke amongst the trailing vines, looking deep in the shadows and recesses, ever so cautiously, to hopefully find nests of newly-laid late-spring duck eggs. Most often, these would only be visible when the mother was out for a brief time on the water. If she was there, keeping her eggs warm, her natural camouflage would likely cause us to not see her, or her nest, at all.
When we returned to visit the nest, Pookie, ever the polite lady-dog, would respectfully keep her distance as we admired the dark and light brown feathers of the mother duck, blending in perfectly with the leaf litter around her. Those beautiful feathers, along with her head and neck tucked discretely down, eyes on the ground, in absolute stillness provided her with perfect invisibility. The duck would remain there silently, seemingly lost in the depths of concentration on her task. This deep focus, coupled with her ability to blend into her surroundings kept her and her family safe at such a moment of extreme vulnerability. If we hadn’t previously known of her location, that intense mindfulness, more often than not, would have resulted in our inability to see her at all.
But there she was. And the bright white eggs, filling her nest, covered with the mother’s body, were completely undetected, just two or three feet from the path that we all walked on every day. Brooding and shrouded by the overlaying blanket of nature’s protective twigs and leaves, she rested there, right along the shore, being buoyed and fed by the waters that were sweetly cradling us all.
Learning from the duck and her soon to be hatched string of baby ducklings, as a six or seven year old child, without really realizing it, I began to try my hand at invisibility. Sometimes, with the natural stressors of family life, I would find myself needing to go out somewhere and slip into the bushes where I could lie on my back on the soft leafy dirt to decompress. One such hidey hole that I frequented, was a thick corner landscape planting in a near neighbor’s yard, just along the sidewalk. It occupied about eight or ten square feet of shrubs of varying sizes. If I was in there and didn’t want to be seen when someone came by on the sidewalk, I’d do like the mother duck and just lay, very still, shifting my focus and momentarily loosing my sense of self by concentrating on the leaves overhead, or the unfathomable depths of the deep blue sky, until those passers had all gone by.
Later, in my teenage years, occasionally I would find myself in the midst of a caper. This might be something like digging a scoot-under-hole beneath a fence, to gain periodic access to the expansive hills and lawns of a nearby golf course, in the dark of night. Again, if someone happened by, I’d get very still and focus on the bushes beside me, allowing my consciousness to enter into the bark and flow with the fluids of their stems. I would hold my concentration on the plants, imagining I was a part of their inner workings, feeling what it would be like to be a water droplet, high up in a leaf, waving softly among the others. And then, even if the persons passing by had a dog, my stillness and focus on being one with the plants, let them all go right on by, without seeing or sensing my presence at all.
My mother grew up on a farm and she knew the importance of nature’s lessons for young children and thus granted us the freedom to explore and learn how to keep ourselves safe. She was also very practical. She taught us how to make soap from wood ash and bacon grease. She also felt it was important for us to learn the tougher lessons of life and death. And so, it was decided, when I was about eleven years old, that it was time for us children to learn how to butcher a chicken. She had just begun this task with my brothers and together, they were awaiting my arrival.
Now, the chickens were my friends. Yes, we collected the eggs and we even bought and cooked chickens from the store. Yet, somehow, in my child’s mind, I hadn’t quite put all of that together until I stumbled on the scene, freshly back from a swim.
My mother explained to me what she was planning to teach us that day. As a devoted lover of animals, I couldn’t even imagine something so horrid. Noticing that I was about to bolt, my two brothers, who were eagerly complicit in the plan, grabbed hold of me. They held me tight while I watched my mother take a sharp serrated knife and saw the head off of one of our young roosters. She dropped the chicken’s body on the ground and left it to run in circles on the lawn until it lay pulsing and spilling the last of its blood from its severed neck.
Taking advantage of the momentary shock of this abhorrent scene, I managed to scramble free and ran through the house and out the front door, needing to desperately escape and hide, in order to heal my mind from what I had just seen.
Our lake had raised me well. The minnows and the ducks showed me the way. I ducked into the depths of our garage and before anyone had gathered themselves enough to follow and find me, I slipped into the snapped vinyl covered backseat of our two door convertible car, firmly closing the door behind me. There, in the dark, under a couple of blankets, I curled up on the seat, shed a few sobs and then steadied my breath, becoming just as still as the mother ducks had taught me. I let myself meld into the seat beneath me and into the blankets above, focusing on their warmth and their texture, silently and quietly immersing my mind into the threads and folds of the fabric.
In the quiet dark, nestled there, I was barely aware of the sounds of my family
as they were scurrying around, looking for me. My brothers hopped on their bikes and scoured the neighborhood, reporting back to my mother. My friend’s families were called. My parent’s voices grew progressively more disturbed. My father even looked inside the car, peeking under the taught vinyl covering. Seeing nothing amiss, just the usual untidy scramble of blankets, he shut the door and moved on thoroughly searching the garage. And then he left, to regroup with the rest of the family, to see if I’d yet been found.
An hour or two passed. Darkness began to fall. And then night set in. By then, I felt a little better and decided they’d all had enough. So, I quietly left my little dark den and to their astonishment, I silently walked in the front door, head held high, and went straight to my room. I shut the door and pushed the dresser across it, to keep it shut and went to bed. Everyone knew that a line had been crossed and no words were spoken about the event on the following morning, or any time after that. Soon after, I became a vegetarian and remained so for many, many years.
As a young woman, I learned about a metaphysical trait attributed to groups of indigenous cultures world round. It is most commonly referred to as shape shifting. When I first learned of it, I had a lingering sense of familiarity. Upon reflection, I recognized aspects of it from the experiences of my youth. A person who has the skill of a shape-shifter, may be running one moment, then perhaps they swiftly duck into the leafy cover along the edge of a meadow. In the next moment, a jack rabbit might be seen bounding agilely off into the nearby trees. And the person is gone. Though I’ve not done any shape-shifting, it seems to me that perhaps the beginnings of that skill may lie in opening the mind and then directing one’s consciousness, asking, and then if welcome, entering respectfully into another's conscious awareness. Or as the minnows and the ducks and the leaves taught me, perhaps it starts with simply disappearing, by becoming one, with whatever or wherever we find ourselves.
photo credit: Aleta Arthur
