The Enlightenment of Roadkill

I went to the park for my walk this morning and along the trail I found a dead baby bird. He looked very young and as though some critter might have stolen him from his nest. I moved him off the trail so that no one would step on him, and then I thought about something a friend once told me about the passing of wild or stray animals.

During a talk once with my yoga-teaching, Buddhish friend, Jackson, I mentioned how sad it made me to see dead animals on the side of the road. That conversation sprang from a dilemma I was having about killing a black widow spider who'd built a home under my front porch step. I didn't really want to kill her as she was just a spider doing what spiders do. And, she was doing it on her turf - outdoors. (Had she been indoors I would have rumbled, no prob).

But, I felt I needed to get rid of her. I was having friends over that weekend and, since I didn't allow smoking in the house, my guests would be puffing away on the front porch, likely taking a load off by sitting on the front step. I didn't want anyone to get hurt so something had to be done.

Jackson told me to say a sort of prayer (I know this sounds so hokey but please stay with me) when I killed her to sort of release her energy back into the universe. Tell her she's no longer with her body and to depart from this 'earthbound' place. (I'm totally flashing back to that cute, pudgy shortcake lady from Poltergeist--you? )

Someone once told me that all the things that you love will be waiting for you in Heaven. It seemed to me that Jackson's solution was similar to this idea, in that giving love, in whatever form, guarantees a thing continuity and higher existence.

Even Einstein himself believed in some sort of afterlife. He reasoned that the energy in our bodies has to go somewhere sooooo...

As I moved the baby bird off the track, I whispered to him that he didn't have to stay here anymore and to go join the energy of the universe. (I realize that saying this was probably more for my benefit than his but it's how I cope so.... whatever.)

Then, as I continued my walk, I kept thinking about that bird and about releasing energy back into the universe. I thought about how it was misspent energy as it was wasted there on the ground and that it could do so much more spent somewhere else.

Then I thought about my bad food day yesterday and about how I needed to not waste anymore energy on it. The day was dead. The event was dead. The energy I spent on worrying and fretting and beating myself up with was still stuck in those dead events.

So I let it go.

I think that there are many situations in our lives where we leave precious energy to fester negatively on some past event. Wouldn't we be better off if we revisited those events one more time if only to say a prayer of release? Imagine what beautiful things that energy could be released in order to do. Imagine the transformative freedom of ugly 'yesterdays' when we take a moment to whisper: "you can go now - you are no longer part of this place".