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A possum is an unlikely lens on meaning in life. Who looks to a possum for self-awareness? A possum is not majestic like a horse or lion, endearing like a faithful dog or storied like sheep. It’s rather insignificant, really, from most points of view.
I felt that way, too — until a possum appeared in our tiny, enclosed backyard situated between busy streets in the middle of downtown. I first spotted the possum on the sloping surface of a neighboring roof. What a surprise! It looked lost and somehow misshapen.
I ran downstairs to get a camera and slipped out the back door for a better view. The possum had disappeared. Scanning the trees and rooftops, I felt something rub against my bare foot.
A baby possum. I startled the little creature when I jumped almost out of my skin, and it scampered off into the foliage. I tried to follow the small fellow, and when I turned away from the search a minute or two later, there was the original possum standing right behind me — with five babies clinging to her back.
From a distance, they had looked like humps. She was looking for her sixth, her lost possum, I was sure; she had bravely come into our domain to find it. Aging for Amateurs: Climate change can bring anxiety to elders, but there are solutions We gazed at each other for a long moment, eye to eye.
I raised my camera and took her photo. I looked down to adjust the camera, and in that instant, she was gone, vanished. I couldn’t find her anywhere.
The planet had turned, from the fullness of the gripping moment to the ticking reality of ordinary time. I still look out the window every morning but have not seen mother possum again. There had been nothing miraculous in the moment, unless you consider the sheer survival of possums miraculous in a universe of fast and heavy traffic, pesticides and acres of pavement.
Still, the moment when she held me in her eye stays with me. Why? Aging for Amateurs: Some answers to questions have to be lived Today's Top Headlines Story continues below Charleston firm pays $22M for Festival Centre, signs entertainment venue as anchor Charleston's nightlife culminates on King Street with more than 70 restaurants, bars, clubs Filling the void: Spartanburg's WestGate Mall renews effort to sell vacant spaces A ship was abandoned near Johns Island. Now, the Coast Guard is coming to clean up its mess.
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Clemson's most explosive offense since when? Takeaways from a rout of App State Hamilton: Gamecocks bloody their knuckles in identity-defining win Maybe it was this: A war exists between the natural world of possums and pine forests and the unrelenting encroachment of urban development. Yet there are moments of truce. Think of the famous Christmas truce in World War I when the guns fell silent for a day as enemies, fragile humans from both front lines, met and sang carols together.
When moments like these happen, humans realize a relatedness that’s deeper than the surface interests powered by civilization and its conventions. Such moments hold open a space for us to remember who we are underneath the mindsets that divide us. Aging for Amateurs: Oh Be Joyful For me, that remembering space, that stillness and truce, was the encounter with the mother possum.
For Dale, it’s spying lazy snakes stretched on logs as he kayaks through Sparkleberry Swamp. It is Steve catching the song of an early black and white warbler in a bush by the forest path. And there is Loren Eiseley, scholar and naturalist, after a surprise encounter with a scared, vulnerable muskrat: “I walked away, obscurely pleased that darkness had not gained on life by any act of mine.
” For my wife working in her garden, the remembering happens when she witnesses the slow unfurling of a fiddlehead fern. And that truce belongs to all readers who recall a moment when a wave of tenderness, a recognition of kinship, swept through your mind and refreshed it in the presence of the Other — some member of the natural world radically different from yourself. It may have seemed like no big deal, but face to face in that moment of encounter, your wave of recognition had the force of an ocean beneath it — the shared reality of life, the surge of love on a universal scale.
Many conversations and testimonies convince me that elders normally grow into hosting that kind of recognition. We get an inkling that we belong to a relational web. We are individuals, yet members of a greater organism than “me.
” Irish and British novelist Iris Murdoch used the term “unselfing” to describe that awareness of a truer selfhood that is a world or two beyond ego. It can be mediated by science or art or spiritual practice, a garden, a starfish on the beach — or even a possum. But now we’re soaring way off from the humble possum.
She has her particular role to play, her own tasks, instincts, intelligence, gifts and abilities. She is who she is. What little I know of her story reminds me that we all have our story, our own tasks, intelligence and gifts.
The real task of maturity is to discover the gift within oneself and learn to use it well. Mother possum was seeking her separated one. I’m confident she found him.
I was separated, too, in my own civilized way. In what botanist and author Robin Wall Kimmerer calls a “seeming coincidence of the smallest thing” — our meeting in the back garden — the puzzle pieces slipped into place, and mother possum gave me a moment of living from the perspective of wholeness. And in her search for her lost joey, it was a reminder that our tasks are essentially similar: the most important business in life is to look after each other.
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