Hola, Huya: New planetoid named after rain god Remember Quaoar?

I am here. My computer is elsewhere, under anaesthesia and in pain.

Yesterday, the most amazing thing happened. Granted, the world is a continuum of most amazing things happening, randomly and sequentially, but that is a story too large to tell and is best experienced without attempts to explain It. This particular most amazing thing, a moment's microcosm of the eternal macrocosm, a distillation of magic from the eternal Magic Trick, blew me out of the allegorical water. It was at water's edge it happened.

My work is with 'at-risk youth.' The youth I work certainly has his issues, but he might be at-risk of Buddhahood as well. I shadow him in school, which has been one interesting trip that has jostled memories long festering and undigested. After school, we go to the library, the pool, and yesterday, we went to a creek to 'hop on rocks,' the ultimate processing activity.

We skipped along the creek, catching fleet shimmers of minnow and shadows of darting crawfish, pulled along by butterflies and a breeze so fresh and golden it might have blown in from Nirvana. Imagine the echo of a ten year old giggle with the gurgle of an old stream, carving the grantie boulders that cradle it's meander... voices old and new bouncing off the other, rippling outward and onward. Imagine the smile my face makes when at once it relives a ten-year old's mutable and numinous mindscape, where the borders between worlds are porous and everywhere. Hopping on rocks just for the sake of it, straddling islands because we can.

We came to his destination; a large boulder with an old noble tree fallen over it. We looked into the pools for signs of life; of course, life stared us back in the face... amoebas, polychaete, algae, snail trails. Then, as I looked away, following a bluejay's swooping blur...

"Mr. Jay, Mr. Jay, come and look at this, quick!!!"

And I was a little at loss to explain it. Coiled at the bottom of a shallow pool, a black and yellow dead something. At first, I thought it might have been some larval stage of damselfly, but it was too big. Using a stick, we found that this was a drowned caterpillar. "Quick, we've got to get it out!" I explained that it was dead, and part of the natural cycle for the dead insect to become food for other organsims... the dead form the delicate matrix of the living. "Get it out anyway, I want to see it!"

Using my hand, I scooped the caterpillar up with my hand and set it's drenched and stiff body on the rocks. The boy gazed into the creature with wide eyes. "There's gonna be one less butterfly in the world." "Yes, that's true, but nature must have intended it." "But Mr. Jay, sometimes we need to help nature, right?." "Right, but in this case, there's nothing we can do."

Right?

Using a thin twig, he touched it tentatively. What had appeared to be a lifeless body twitched. "It's alive Mr. Jay! It's alive!" I was awestruck. "Now, there's gonna be one more butterfly in the world!" I'll be damned. He was right. The caterpillar was now fully revived, and soggily made it's way along the rock. A miracle? The thing looked utterly devoid of life, I felt it was hopeless. Within a minute I was proven utterly wrong, and the revived life crawled on it's way to become a butterfly as I stood in slack-jawed wonder and the boy, affirmed and strengthened by his call to save it, hopped along and over the clear current.

The most amazing thing... intervening in nature's process, the drowning caterpillar, the amazed boy, the revival, the spreading of future wings. I had to turn my head so he wouldn't see my tears. Could this simple gesture be the 'sign' I've been looking for, a validation, a miracle, a serendipitous splash of holy water and wet sneakers? Could be. Something so simple, something so sweet, illumination as sparkling as sun bouncing across creekwater, as a ten year old boy and a thrity year old man meet at the still place in the flow, supported by the same stones, finding future's wings.

Life may be concealed in the most hopeless of shapes, but may be rekindled by the most hopeful of eyes.