What was I reading that day outside at the café that made me so quiet inside myself? I cannot recall, but I remember the feeling of stillness and receptivity, as if I’d dropped down deep into my own body, as if I were fully cooperating with the force of gravity.
The subtle power called Now was having its way with me.
So, when a tiny gnat landed in my coffee, I was all there.
It was absolutely minuscule. Smaller than any letter of this type font. Its sudden arrival touched down into my quiet like a private miracle. People chatting at the other tables, families, dogs, bicycles passing, crows in the trees — and none of it intruding. None of it disturbing the separate rhythm of the miniature story unfolding at my table.
I scooped the gnat out of the foam with a teaspoon and tipped it slightly to let the coffee slowly run off. The gnat lay drenched and splayed on the stainless steel, unmoving.
I placed one corner of a paper napkin lightly, lightly against the drop of liquid that surrounded the gnat, not touching its body, and let the paper absorb a bit of the fluid. Then repeated with each corner. The gnat lay perfectly still and flattened, as if glued to the spoon.
For a long time, I just watched it while nothing appeared to be happening. I couldn’t tell whether it was alive or dead. I hoped for the life of this small stranger.
Eventually, threadlike bits, thinner than any thread and barely visible, began to awkwardly bend and wave.
As close as I could without touching it, I laid a dry napkin beside the teeny quivering body. After a while, it dragged its still sodden form up onto the paper and lay there. I could only imagine its heaving breath.
There was a patch of sunlight on my table, so I placed the napkin in it.
Sometimes the gnat moved and sometimes it didn’t. Minutes later the wings began to whirr, though of course I couldn’t hear them. How overjoyed I was. How peculiar we are. I have swatted many, many such gnats in my life without a thought.
When at last it took off into its precarious future, my heart leapt. I sat for some time before returning to my book.
This experience of a brief and unexpected intimacy dwells in me as a delicate gift. I was as I wish I could always be: present, responsive, willing to be interrupted, kind.
What endless possibilities our world offers for relationship and grand adventure! What difficulty we have being available for them!
The joy was not in having saved the gnat but in having been close to it. I entered for a time the high drama of its teeny and magnificent existence. These invitations are everywhere, saturating us with the inherent worth and beauty of being.
But maybe there is something about when a thing needs saving. How the preciousness, which always belongs to everything, comes forth so vividly, and the fact of existence, that anything is at all, is almost more than one can bear.
Just about everything needs saving these days. So there’s a lot of opportunity to get close to the essence of things if we don’t carry on with business as usual. If we replace our compulsive questions of “How can I use this?” (narcissistically, economically, agriculturally, industrially, recreationally) with the most beautiful question of all: “Who are you?” And we might have the most beautiful experience of all if we stay and let that person, that piece of land, that flower or insect or stone speak to us its answer.
