Toad

I was walking by. He was sitting there...he didn't move.

I began to talk.

He looked neither up nor down, which didn't necessarily mean he was either afraid or asleep. I felt his energy, stored under his tongue perhaps, and behind his bulging eyes....

I talked about how the world seems to me, five feet tall, the blue sky all around my head. I said, I wondered how it seemed to him, down there, intimate with the dust.

He might have been Buddha-didn't move, blink or frown, not a tear fell from those gold-rimmed eyes as the refined anguish of language passed over him.

There is a saying. If you meet Buddha on the road, kill him. So there's the Toad, a source of wisdom, an open book of nature's scripture. What do we do? Kill the honest being of the toad by chatting with him/him - objectifying the amphibian as if s/he is only there to take in our species way of communicating? Mary got into the tire wheel to lie with the dead fox, and likewise Buddha says we are to live in the mud of the earth. Down there. With the toads and their spring eggs, fragile accumulations of DNA is bags of skin. Out of the death of our separateness, who knows, a lotus flower may erupt in silence. I hope. I hop.

How does language keep us from ourselves, from interconnection? Or does it?