Fly and discover

If you are a close friend of mine, then this Christmas you have received a humble gift from me. Nothing very much, just a butterfly refrigerator magnet with this scrawled on the green frog card: This season and always — fly and discover! If you are a close friend of mine, I’m sure you did not stop to wonder what I meant. You tossed the butterfly on to the refrigerator, and threw away all else. Maybe you looked at the card. A frog card? It’s Christmas! What is she doing with a frog card?

I stumbled across decks of those cards while rummaging through a surplus store many years ago, when I had just moved into Lily Pad and discovered that my pond had many kinds of frogs in it. There were the regular ones that filled the pond with eggs that soon turned into tadpoles then turned into itty-bitty frogs — hundreds of which sat on my lily pads, motionless, just staring at me. For them, I wrote my column Lilypad Lectures.

Then there were the bullfrogs that made a different kind of noise and were superbly big and ugly. You caught them mating — the male on top of the female. If you pulled the male out of the water, the female was connected to it and their eggs were different, like yards of flat string that filled up the pond and hatched quickly, too.

Then there were the tree frogs, which sounded like birds, were thin, green and yellow, whose tadpoles looked different. I liked the tree frogs best. They are the ones on the cards I decided to use this Christmas.

All these lessons on the kinds of frogs, their eggs, how they mate, I learned not from a book but by watching them at my pond in Calamba, now a restaurant. I learned that frogs are just natural gossips. When they croak, they must be telling their compatriots — hey, there’s a new pond in the neighborhood and it’s big. Let’s go there. As owner of the pond you just have to face facts: There is a need to keep the frog population down unless you are willing not to sleep at night.

So I hired a frog keeper who fishes out the frogs, especially during the mating season when they are at their noisiest. The frog keeper knows how to dress frogs to remove their poison and they enjoy feeding on them. Thus some kind of peace descended on my ponds. No, I don’t want to hear any protests from any activists. There were too many frogs and my system of controlling gave meaning to their lives.

How would I have known how to do that if I hadn’t quite often flown and discovered other useful ways of dealing with my problems? That’s what I mean by “fly and discover.”

Sit quietly anywhere. Breathe evenly, blanking your mind of all thoughts. Just wait until nothing is on your mind. Then kick the ground and look up at the sky, inhale deeply and smile. Now imagine flight. Break through the clouds, feel them brush moistly across your cheeks, feel the wind rush by, yes, fly. Look forward, what do you see? If it’s night, millions of twinkling stars giggling with their lights, lightening up the quiet of darkness. Do you see bats? Birds? No bees at this height. Look at the lights beneath you. The world has turned into a mass of glittering gems, fly and enjoy what you see.

Watch the dawn as it breaks and blankets the earth in muted shades. Swoop down to the seas. Do the dolphins rise to meet you? What about the stingrays? Observe the gardens at mid-morning as the sun comes up and intensifies. Do the flowers change their colors, too? Do they stay open or closed? Watch people rush for lunch. Do they dash out for a quick lunch at the corner store? Do they linger over lunch at the more expensive places? What do they drink with their lunch? Water? Tea? Juice? Coke? Martinis? What is it they do that you don’t do, have never done, would like to try? Then, when you get back, try it. Change something in your life, create something new and find your life more invigorating, more refreshing, younger, more joyful.

Don’t miss the sunset, the beautiful vivid colors of the sun about to go to sleep, leaving behind orange and purple streaks, or the summer when in parts of the world you look up at the sky and find it emerald green at night.

We live in a beautiful world that we can discover on our own without leaving home. Just sit quietly anywhere. Breathe evenly, blanking your mind of all thoughts. Just wait until nothing is there. Then kick the ground and look up at the sky, inhale deeply and smile. Now imagine flight, fly high and discover.

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