Worms and Suds

Maybe it's due to end-of-term grading loads...maybe I'm really losing my mind and just finally starting to notice...but lately the world around me has offered some startling new degree of Presence, if not Insight. It's as if, suddenly, seeing a tree bud up close is somehow bringing me full circle from, "Oh, it's Spring." to the botanical comprehension of it all, then again through some cycle-of-life insight, and back again to just marveling at nature. (Likely this makes no sense to anyone but myself; that's why I'm sharing it.)

Example: this very morning, about 5am...it was STILL raining when I came in to work. Like always, I stopped at the back door of the building, fished out my key, and then--I noticed an earthworm. Yes, they come out when it's raining (something I'm now inspired to really grasp), but this particular worm had 'wormed' its way to the doormat of the college. (It is finals week, remember, and maybe I was lost in thought there about the mental state of worms and students, how this very worm (eager beaver) was waiting at the gates of higher learning, "First one here!"--but that did not last long.) That fleeting thought fled when I noticed something much more interesting...

The doormat is of the variety that features many, many little rubber 'nubbies' or thick hairs. They are about the diameter of a pencil lead, and they are less-than a 1/2 inch tall. The worm was working its way across the doormat, shimmying through these nubbies. Most of its body, then, was in a perfectly straight line; however, sometime prior to my arrival, something had compelled the worm to make a right hand turn, continue an inch or so, then a left turn, and it was in the process of another right. (I had never seen a worm do such a thing, something that seemed strikingly symetrical for a worm. If you can imagine, it created something of a question mark by design.)

Of course, the nubbies had guided the worm in forming such straight lines, but I will always wonder if the worm was raising a question. Was it just making its way through an unnecessarily complicated route? (It could have shot straight across the mat, after all, or just never bothered to go there in the first place!) Was it sending me a sign? Did the nubbies feel good, rubbing along its sides, or did the worm find them laborious and bothersome? Do I sometimes, like this worm, get so confounded by the nubbies that I cannot take my naturally wormy course?

Previously, maybe a week ago, I was driving across Wichita early one morning when I spied a white blob ahead, just over the hill. As I approached, it was becoming clear to me the blob was not simply a trash bag, as I had first assumed. Since I was going 45 or so, I closed on it rapidly. The few other vehicles on this same course had either stopped or swerved or taken some other detour when their drivers realized the blob was as big as a freight car...however, I did not waiver. In the instant I knew it to be suds, bubbles, what-have-you...I forged on through. (I drive a pickup, and thus, my untoward mentality.) It was great fun to plow through the foam, to look in my rear view mirror at how the blob had scattered in my wake. (The source of the blob, I also came to note, was some prankster dumping detergent in the waterfall element outside some swank housing development.)

The blob of bubbles, the wall of suds, gained almost metaphysical proportion to me. I had persisted. I had burst through...when others had been wary, I was bold. Of course, this is silly, but then, charging through an opaque obstruction is also both silly and dangerous...I am just noting that such a thing had never crossed my path before, in nigh 40 years of driving. It still strikes me as something beyond peculiar, something...meaningful...but I've not yet figured it out. Like the lifespan of a bubble, whatever I should have taken with me from that instant just seems to have popped. Thus, I have had an epiphany with no piff. Something happened, but I do not know what it was (?)

These are but two of somewhere near a dozen "twilight zone" observations I've had in the last two weeks. Am I losing my mind? Opening my mind?...or am I just dazed and overworked?

We'll see.