WW#1: The Worms; Connecting w/Everything
This week’s Weekly Weird is about worms. I’m not a huge fan of worms. I’m not squeamish around them, I grew up in Minnesota, you get over being weirded out by worms after you’ve put a few hundred of them on fish-hooks. I think it’s just the way they are there, lurking under the ground, it’s creepy. Most people have heard the expression, “Food for worms,” another unpleasant connotation. I like them though, they do their thing and leave me alone, that’s all I can expect out of any being.
The other night I was outside, I have a sidewalk I like, it’s great for pacing. The little section of sidewalk near my piece of parking lot is all mine, no one really comes over this way much. At any rate, I stepped on something. I knew it was a slimy critter friend. Had it been a snail, I’d have heard the inevitable crunch but no crunch came, that’s how I knew, slug or worm. So I looked down and to my shock, there were loads of them, a worm parade.
When it’s dark and wet out, still kind of sprinkling, and you look down and see around ten to twenty worms crossing the sidewalk right in front of you with more in the distance, it’s weird. It was like they were on some wormy pilgrimage but to where, I had no idea. They all seemed to be going the same direction and none were being shy about it. Their bodies were stretched to full and you could see them moving. Worms aren’t known for going very fast so when you see them trucking that way, like they’re participating in some weird wormathalon, it’s weird.
As I looked down at them it was easy to imagine they were bigger than they really were, that they weren’t just trying to innocently cross the sidewalk, rather, that they were coming after me. Since my logical brain knew this wasn’t the case, I was safe to explore where my mind wanted to go. I took a deep breath and went there, thinking, OK worm friends, what?
I’m walking down the sidewalk, there’s a light rain unworthy of an umbrella, especially for an Oregonian, we laugh in the face of rain. As I walk, I feel something underfoot, a sort of slippery pop happens under my right foot. When I look down to see what I’m going to have to scrape off my shoe later, I notice worms, worms crossing the sidewalk en masse, they’re going faster than I’ve seen worms go before. They seem to be lifting their tiny little heads, sniffing the air. As I’m wondering whether or not worms have noses, one reaches my shoe, it stops, then burrows in.
It isn’t as though the worm is rearing back its tiny head and ripping into and through my shoe with fearsome teeth, it’s more like the worm simply became less dense and went right through my shoe, then my foot and then out the other side. Another worm came along, I hadn’t moved since the first one passed through my foot. The second one did the same and I noticed more, I noticed that the worms seemed to be moving quickly now while I was the one going slow. I went so slow, eventually, I just stopped.
Now there were worms all about my feet, on all sides but they weren’t passing through me or past me anymore, they were making their way to me. I took another very deep breath as the worms formed a sort of puddle at my feet and I didn’t know where I stopped and they started. I surrendered and as I did, I slipped right into the ground through the wormy portal at my feet. The top layer of the earth was a sort of thin line between where I was and where I was going, like a filter, and as I went through it, I became less dense, like the worms had, only I didn’t maintain my form like my slimy friends had, I became the ground. The dirt, the mud, there was a gum-wrapper behind me like an intruder, I could feel it. It was becoming one with the dirt too.
The feeling you get on a really hot day when you get into a nice cool swimming pool, that was the coolness I felt. Only it was dark and it smelled as only damp earth can smell. I had no form, there was no me. There was dirt and sun and rain and seed and shit and rot and growth and a cascade of other things that came into me all at once, the information was overwhelming at first but this wasn’t my first rodeo.
The experience validated what I’ve known for a long, long while. The same thing happens every time I connect to anything natural, anything alive, it’s the same message, we are all connected. Even worms and dirt know this, why don’t we?