I didn’t see the slug when I first sat down by the pond to meditate. There are still some blue flag iris’ blooming but the plant in front of me was green and brown leaves and stems with seed pods on their ends.
The slug was curled around one seed pod, looking like it was a part of the plant. I don’t know how long it took me to see it, but once I did, I saw that it kept moving.
Like watching a cloud change shape in a windless sky, I measured the slugs movement, not by the distance it traveled, but by how its shape and color changed.
Wrapped around the seed pod the slug was thick and compact, the same color as the dried leaves reaching up from the stem and cradling the pod.
When it started to move down the stem, the slug became long and thin and instead of the darker brown, now its tail glowed yellow, and its grayish body had an orange glow. Much like the color of the dying leaves it was slowly moving towards.
I watched a black ant crawl over the slugs body.
I saw a gnat sized spider, spin a silk strand from a piece of thin grass towards the slug. When it reached the slug the spider seemed to pause, (although it was so small I couldn’t really see what it was actually doing) then make the decision not to attach its spiders silk to the slug, walked back the way it came and continued on in the opposite direction.
When the slug got down to the base of the stem, where dying leaves fell, it took on a new shape and color mimicking the browning leaves.
My first encounter with a slug was when I was a kid and stepped on one. I squirmed at the squishy feeling and was grossed out at the slime that stuck to my bare foot.
Around the same time I watched as my friend poured salt on a slug and it shriveled before my eyes. That was the first time I felt empathy for a slug.
Later when I had a garden of my own, I put beer in a flat bowl, to keep the slugs off my plants. Even though it killed the slugs, the idea of them drowning drunk in beer didn’t bother me the way watching them dehydrate in salt did. I figured at least it wasn’t as painful.
I have’t had a slug in my garden since moving to Upstate NY. I do have snails, but they don’t do much damage and if there are lot of them, I just pick them off my plants and put them someplace else.
As with yesterdays fly that I took a video of, today’s slug was a wonder to watch.
I’ve seen lots of videos of octopuses changing their color, texture and shape to avoid danger. But I’ve never knew that slugs do the same thing.
When my timer went off, I was surprised I’d been sitting by the pond, watching the slug, for an hour. I couldn’t wait to get back to the house to tell Jon what I saw.
Afterward I realized a slug is the perfect animal to meditate to. Especially this one at this hour, who moved very slow, but kept never stopped moving.
I feel like it put me in “slug time.” Not just slowing my internal clock, but altering it. It was more like time spent in my studio. Not about ticking off of seconds, but about noticing how the space around me is filled with color, light, patterns, textures and movement.
A more abstract and organic kind of time, that speaks to my emotions instead of my intellect.
