The Beauty of Lizards

Night makes mirrors of the windows. I drink coffee sitting in Sandburg’s city of the “broad shoulders”. Random thoughts. Nothing in my head but mush. Struggling to write, I reach for my old familiar muses of sadness and despair. Nothing. Perhaps the rare burst of love and happiness are waiting. Again nothing. But I will write. Keeping the words in my skull leads to abscesses of the brain. Maybe the lines will come from a little gratitude…a little chance for wonder…maybe…

Beauty buys coffee and flashes a smile. Beauty sleeps in the bed where I slept. Beauty flows by in the traffic that is somehow choreographed to the beat of Marvin Gaye as What’s Goin’ On floats from the speakers. I stare at a sparkle of light in my cup until it dissolves into a prism of color. The prism expands, filling my vision. It is enough.

I find myself running in the backyard of our Nederland house. The grass is brown from the late summer drought that bakes everything. Soon the rains will come drenching the black gumbo clay, flooding streets, and bringing the occasional hurricane.

The yard is full of hazards – stones, cockleburs, and sometimes even a piece of glass. These are nothing to me. The soles of my feet are black, tanned leather from months and years of going barefoot across lawns, cement and gravel.

I am running to Jeff’s house. Jeff of the red hair and so many freckles it is hard to tell if his skin is white with red spots or red with white spots. His house is across the field from mine. We spend days together running in the sun, building forts in the empty lots, crying when we are forced to come in at night.

Today as I run, something catches my eye. There, on a firethorn bush, the kind with the orange-red waxy berries, is a tiny lizard. It writhes in agony. It was put there by a jaybird or a maybe a mockingbird. I have watched them do it. They will catch a lizard and then stick it on a thorn until it stops wriggling, making it easier to eat I guess.

As a child I found this horrible. But today’s journey through the scene is with eyes a half-century older. I see only harmony here. Nothing terrible. The birds chicks are waiting for the lizard to stop writhing. They will quickly eat it, growing strong to make more chicks. The lizard’s young will be fine, they are able to fend for themselves as soon as they hatch. Life has deep wisdom and beauty.

The same is true for we naked apes, or, if you insist, we pinnacles of creation. We will find ourselves writhing on our own thorn someday. The thorn may be cancer, simple old age, or something as spectacular as a hurricane or other natural disaster. Regardless, we will pass from this life. Our passage may be peaceful or in agony, but pass we will. Today I see my future passing as a thing of beauty. I am fortunate beyond measure to simply have glimpsed life, much less experience it for more than half a century. I may see the future end of my life as beauty or tragedy. I will seek to find it beautiful. Not a goal to be sought but a flower to be appreciated once it is offered. Until that time I pray to smell every flower, know that the world is filled with love not evil if I only choose to see it, and see the beauty…share the beauty…live in the beauty that is all around me.