"Patience wears my grandmother's filligree earrings. She bakes marvelous dark bread. She has beautiful hands. She carries great sacks of peace and purses filled with small treasures. You don't notice Patience right away in a crowd, but suddenly you see her all at once, and then she is so beautiful you wonder why you never saw her before."


I like Patience. That's from The Book of Qualities by J. Ruth Gendler, for those of you looking for an old book to dig up.

I have had an exercise with Patience over these last two days. Yesterday I caught mr. zippy instigating the dog to seize upon a H-U-G-E grub worm that had somehow made its way into our house. I think the dog was scared of it, though, as she shimmied her way behind mr. zippy's knees.

Then he told me to "sic the cat on it!" at which time I did point the worm out to the cat but she's so over-fed she couldn't be bothered to make a snack out of something actually ALIVE.

Then I noticed a peculiar thing. The grub worm began changing colors - first it was sort of a canvas color, like our curtains. The further it wriggled away from the curtains, the more it became brown, light brown, dark brown, brown - like our hardwood floor.

"Kill it!" mr. zippy urged, not because he wanted the damned thing dead, but because he wanted his world - the living room, the dog, the cat, the wife, the television program - uninterrupted.

"Look how it's camoflauging itself," I said, my eyes wide with wonder. I looked between the worm and mr. zippy and I said "We're not killing this thing. We're going to set it free."

mr. zippy said nothing as I picked up a magazine and scooted the worm on top of it -- and watched it change a myriad of colors as it desperately tried to match those on the magazine.

I took it outdoors in the rain and put it back in the earth where it belonged. Then I couldn't help but check on it periodically until the rain was so great I could no longer see through it.



This morning, on my way back from class, I found an inch worm desperately hanging onto the inside of my door mirror. As I reached 40 mph only it's head and tail were clinging to the mirror. The rest of its body was curved into a u-shape and doing its best to go into the wind.

I finally pulled to the side of the road, put my hazards on before getting out of the cab and pulling the worm from my mirror. I pulled a wet leaf from the side of the door and urged the worm onto it.

But the worm did not want to let go the mirror.

It took some coaxing, but it finally relaxed enough to the leaf. As it stretched to grasp the coarse, wet surface, it also flexed it's head upward in my direction.

As I put the inch worm at the base of a tree and watched it wriggle its way back to the bark, I knew mr. zippy would have been bemused if not angered by my worm rescue tactics.

Then I wondered if I had just been tested, and whether or not I passed?

"Compassion wears Saturn's rings on the fingers of her left hand. She is intimate with the life force. She understands the meaning of sacrifice. She is not afraid to die. There is nothing you cannot tell her.

Compassion speaks with a slight accent. She was a vulnerable child, miserable in school, cold, shy, alert to the pain in the eyes of her sturdier classmates. The other kids teased her about being too sentimental, and for a long time she believed them. In ninth grade she was befriended by Courage.

Courage lent Compassion bright sweaters, explained the slang, showed her how to play volleyball, taught her you can love people and not care what they think about you.

In many ways Compassion is still the stranger, neither wonderful, nor terrible, herself, utterly, always."