One December afternoon, I arrived in Patagonia with a big green backpack, a small bilingual edition of Pablo Neruda's love poems, and a broken heart. (Although the heart, of course, never breaks.) When I got out of the plane, the Andes towered above me like stone thrones of the gods, covered with snow on the eye of a lake of ice, blue like Uranus, their scale so mysterious that you are no longer a person but a particle, a speck of dust in the eye of eternity; the trees are no longer trees but the moss covers the slopes until they reach the water's edge, as if they are surveying the boundaries of their land. I had come to test my limits.
As soon as I settled in the house I was going to stay in, I went out walking on a dirt road that looked like a place on the moon. Cars waved me through cloud after cloud of fuel and dust. I closed my eyes to let them pass, picturing the Pillars of Creation – that famous Hubble image of the Eagle Nebula, whose gas and dust are constantly in the process of creating new stars while simultaneously being burned by the light of nearby newborn stars.
I hadn't gone an hour when the sky turned to steel. Without warning, the clouds opened their dumb mouths and poured rain so cold that time seemed to have reversed, sending the equator back into winter.
It rained all night and the next day. Finally, unable to bear my inner captivity, I put on all the clothes I had piled on top of the others, squeezed into a raincoat that was now two sizes too small, and headed out again. But when I entered the street, I found it completely transformed, all the dust washed away to reveal a carpet of glistening stones that almost glowed.
Suddenly, my eye fell on a striking stone unlike any other – a swirling shade of green, like the skin of some exotic snake.
That the Earth decided to make something so beautiful, when it could have just made granite, felt like a miracle – a miracle of all those things that are not necessary to live, like music, like love, which give meaning to life.
As soon as I got back to the house, I turned to the geological database to learn that it is a type of stone called snake, which is special not only in its appeal but in its origin: Snake species were formed under the sea, in rivers that discharge hot water near the mid-ocean ridges, where life on Earth probably began. Under extreme temperature and pressure, the water fuses the four minerals into a metamorphic rock that fuses to give it this amazing green color.
There I was, on top of this huge mountain, holding a small piece from the bottom of the earth – a beautiful reminder from the beginning of life, a bright reminder that time makes and re-makes worlds.
I started seeing snakes everywhere.
About a week later, I came home with amazing news: For almost ten years, NASA has been studying the asteroid Bennu, which orbits the Sun a hundred million miles away, between Jupiter and Mars, and passes close to Earth every six years. One of the first asteroids to have dust and rock samples collected and returned to Earth, Bennu's mineral composition turned out to be dominated by serpentine, which not only contains all the essential amino acids for DNA and RNA but also water-soluble phosphates – the basis of the biochemistry of all known organisms on Earth.
The most amazing part is that because the asteroid has no atmosphere, no liquid water can cling to its surface, but the serpent needs water to form – Bennu must be a piece of water world that formed in the outer reaches of the Solar System in the nascent universe, where the elements of life as we know it were created. A giant piece of snake that records the entire evolutionary history of the universe.
Suddenly, against this great background of the majesty and mystery of the universe, I was no longer wounded – I was amazed. It is the self that suffers from the story that seizes the moment. Every thoughtless act – of connection and communication of all that was and will always be, the wonderful essence preserved in time – is the soap of suffering, the means of rebirth.
Somehow, I found myself thinking about the concept of the cosmic egg that is present in many traditional folk tales – the idea that the universe was hatched by a giant bird – and I pictured the egg made of a snake, a newborn world made of time and trust in life.
So, putting in a tumbler of rock and practicing my clay, I made it – a translucent sphere of a snake with a small yellow clay bird perched on it, on a wing with the words TRUST and TIME.
Because the daily creative practice is the consecration of indestructibility to us and the technology of the time of trust, I began to make one birdhouse of the snake every day for forty-two days, with the intention of donating them on my birthday of forty-two days (which is now) with the same impartial hand that made this world, to the people who made my life a pillar for you private, a pillar of rest, the foundation of the student makes my life literally alive by putting food on my table and books on the shelves ami, yes, but it also contributes to what makes life worthwhile – that channel of communication that breaks down the isolation of our own suffering.
To enter the raffle, make a donation at the end of the summer in any amount that's convenient for you, but end with a decimal .42, whether it's $1.42 or $1,000.42. (This will help me distinguish the snake raffle from the general donation.) Let's love ethics over statistics – no cheating the chances by making multiple entries: just one per person, to remember that we are all equal as children of fortune.
As for my daily practice of learning to trust time, somewhere when I made these birds of the snake world, I crossed the threshold between wound and wonder, and my heart began to heal. We do not choose our wounds. But we can choose to hold back our wonder. It is what makes this rocky planet earth and this existence life.
