The acreage I am staying on here in Mexico is home to lots of animals, of course, but is also visited regularly by lots of people. I am thinking that these creatures must be adapted to human traffic, as they are far less skittish than what I am used to. Normally a lizard, or a rabbit or a bird will scurry quickly when humans charge by but I notice that if I stop soon enough they don’t seem bothered by my presence and I can sit and hang out a bit with them. I sat with a lizard the other day for about a half an hour and it was fascinating. The lizard was hyper-aware of me, of course, but just stood in one spot the whole time. At first it was in a posture with its front legs stretched to hold the front of the body as tall as possible. When I started talking gently to it, instantly it splayed its legs down flat on the ground as its eyes got bigger. I swear it was listening. I have had similar experiences with birds. When I sit really still, they will hop closer instead of further when I begin to talk gently to them.

Before I came here I had a dream in which my feet were planted deeply into the earth, like roots of a tree, and my head was high up in the sky, the height of a very tall tree. My body was stretched like a gumby character between the two positions, and my stomach hurt. I’ve been having stomach problems and I felt the dream was telling me something about the ways I stretch myself between earthy knowledge and sky, or transpersonal, knowledge. Something in my system is struggling to digest it all.

I feel I’m learning something from the lizard, who lives as close to the earth as a creature can get and the bird who lives high above it, and it feels connected to the information in this dream. I can’t articulate what I’m learning yet, but I sense it at a cellular level. I am hoping it will help my stomach!