Rescue Missions
by Bernadette Doran
In southern California, rain comes on command. Every morning around dawn sprinklers go on, bathing the manicured lawns and refreshing the roses. But it also dislodges the worms, a death stream that sends them to the unforgiving sidewalk.
When I began to take morning walks for cheap exercise, I noticed them everywhere: worm mummies, dry as thin strips of jerky, fossilized in the pose of their final moments alive. Some had curled themselves into death, in fetal-position comfort against fear. Others were stretched out flat and straight, as if in utter despair or complete surrender. A few were like little sculptures, lifting themselves as far as they could from an inevitable concrete coffin and up toward anything else – a bit of air, a little sunlight, the breath of a disinterested dog.
Now my daily morning walk has become a one-hour worm rescue mission. On a good day, I’ll find maybe half a dozen worms on the sidewalk, still shiny and squirming with life. I pick them up and put them back onto the sweet-smelling wet dirt. As gentle as I am – and not knowing that I’m the only chance for their brief life to be saved – their instinct for self-preservation surges through them full force, and they twist and struggle against my redemptive hand. It takes a minute or two of being back on the soil for them to realize that a miracle has happened, and relax into their second chance for life.
During my worm rescue missions, I often think of stories I’ve read about people who were in horrific accidents and somehow, astonishingly, not only survived but also emerged unscathed. That happened to me once a long time ago. I was climbing rocks on my friends’ farm in Wisconsin, trying to reach a particularly lustrous, tempting branch of bright orange bittersweet growing on the side of the hill. I took a misstep, lost my balance, and started to fall backwards onto sharp, jagged rocks about three feet below me. The certainty of serious injury flashed like hot lightning through my brain – at best, I knew I would have a broken leg or arm, at worst, a crushed skull or cracked spine. In the first second or two of my fall, my terror turned into a thick, churning nausea, and I steeled myself for the inevitable impact against those rocks. I could hear my two friends screaming in the distance, their alarm further horrifying me and adding another sickly layer to my own screaming fear.
But then something impossible happened. Suddenly, I felt as if I were floating like a feather. I felt completely suspended in space, as if something invisible had wrapped itself around me and was lowering me as gently as if I were a Staffordshire teacup. Space swelled and time expanded; a fall that should have taken seconds seemed like it lasted minutes, and all the while, I was floating, floating, floating down. I thought, maybe I’m going to die; maybe this is the peace that comes before death. And then I felt the gentlest of impacts, barely a pressure against my back and head and feet. And I realized that I was lying on those jagged rocks as perfectly and safely positioned as if I’d been placed in a cradle. There wasn’t a scratch on me. My friends, expecting to find me broken and bleeding, were incredulous. So was I.
I know we’re all a part of the food chain on this planet, where something smaller and weaker is always the food for something bigger and stronger. But maybe there’s also a grace chain. Maybe another part of the cosmic design means there’s always something wiser and more powerful looking out for something smaller and more helpless. Maybe, just as I set out on my daily worm rescue missions, angels set out on their daily human rescue missions.
In a management training course, I heard the story of a man who went out on the beach one morning to find hundreds and hundreds of starfish stranded in the sand by the receding tide. He was picking them up one at time and throwing them back into the water when someone walked by and said, “What are you doing?”
The man on the starfish rescue mission said, “Saving a couple of starfish. Why don’t you help me and throw a few back yourself?”
“What difference does it make?” said the passerby. “They’re going to die anyway, and you’re only saving a few. It doesn’t matter!”
And the first man replied, “It matters to the starfish!”
When I walk every day now and look for worms to save, I breathe in the California sunshine with such delight. I’m conscious of my strong legs and spine and functioning brain, and feel so blessed for my health and my life, when the incident on the rocks – or, for that matter, anything else – could have taken them away. I will be eternally grateful for the time in Wisconsin – and perhaps other times I’ve never even realized – that I was picked up and saved by somebody higher up on the grace chain.
Bernadette Doran is a writer, Reiki master and shamanic healer transplanted
to San Diego.
