Find Your Slug Yet?
Find your Slug by Asher Jay, with elements composited from Dall-e2.
I often get asked, “What drives you daily?” My passion to leave a wild legacy of wonder, humility, reverence, connection, diversity, and humanity is what drives me. I intend to do it one slug at a time.
I use “slug” representationally, as a symbolic mascot for all the uniquely expressed flora and fauna that weft and weave to create the tapestry of life on our blue marble.
While a slug was my holy grail, some other extraordinary creature with alien countenance may be another's treasured quest, like an ivory-billed woodpecker or a Jamaican iguana. My crusade to protect the earth’s inimitable beauty, and by extension the irreplaceable roles played by each eccentric organism within our fragile biosphere, can be attributed to the recognition of wild within me. Not metaphorically, but on a cellular level, as a fundamental insight into human ancestry. Wild is in our evolutionary and biological development. Thus, to save wild is to save ourselves.
Why a slug? I have an anecdote for you. Diving is a restorative practice for me. When I am beneath the waves, I am present for each breath I draw and exhale. I am observant and alert, effortlessly suspended by the buoyant salty, undulating vastness that is the sea. All life should be as experientially abundant, feel as at ease, and sensorially immersive as being in the ocean.
When I first began diving, I was ever eager to encounter iconic megafauna. I did not know that silence, taking intentional steady breaths and practicing stillness would ensure a greater chance of exhilarating encounters than constantly propelling my fins toward the next potential sighting. I missed so many moments for connection, because I was always moving toward the next target, never remaining where things were beginning to unfold.
It took me several years of diving to finally find the patience and awareness to spot my first Nudibranch, a sea slug. It was an inch long, soft, white sliver with blue dashes dotting its length. It clung against the currents, to an unassuming branch of coral.
I did not know this at the time, but I had just seen the most commonly occuring marine mollusc in the Sea of Cortez, the Hypselodoris Bertschi. However, to someone who has never seen one before, it may as well have been the mostly critically endangered nudibranch.
The previous version of me would have not even known how to look for one, but as I was on a singular search to commune with this subclass of diminutive marine hermaphrodites I guess I managed to attain my goal.
Disclaimer: While all nudibranchs are sea slugs, not all sea slugs are nudibranchs.
I couldn’t believe it, I was scouting out these insanely vibrant underwater, miniature works of art with the same enthusiasm I had reserved for sharks, rays, dolphins and whales. Finding the slug filled me with unbridled joy. It felt like this tiny oblong, bottom dwelling sea ornament, understood the self work it took me to finally chance upon it. Draped on the coral as the churning surface, curdled visibility around it, this little critter held its own, delicate, vulnerable and so exquisite. I felt immense gratitude, it had rewarded me like a zen master with its presence in fair exchange for my own.
Two years later, I found myself in Montana, where I encountered a completely different exchange about slugs. A stranger in his mid 30s at Murdoch’s announced to his mate, “Found my slug!” My first thought was did he lose a pet slug in the store? My city dweller naivete was promptly corrected by the gentleman. It was deer hunting season, and he was excited to pump a round out of his shotgun at an unsuspecting prey animal that would either be startled, wounded, maimed or slain by his aim.
I doubt I will ever warm up to guns, but I recall thinking, if only he reserved the intentionality and enthusiasm he harboured toward a weighted projectile for a shell-less gastropod instead.
The slug he needed was not the one he had found. What he needed was to cultivate a deeper reverence for life, from a sense of unbound connection to all organisms, no matter their size, or perceived value. Instead, he had found a round that would end a life without compunction and unravel another thread from the tapestry I find my raison d'être to keep intact.
It was interesting to me that the passion with which he looked for the gun powder loaded shell, was the same passion with which I looked for my naked-gilled, intricately patterned reef dweller. We were speaking the same language but the same word was being weaponised by him and canonised by me. Slug, a noun to us both, but capable of shaping two polarised realities. My life's mission became evident in that moment. I needed more minds that instantly associated the word slug with ammunition to mnemonically recall aquatic univalves instead.
Sidebar: Welcome to the world of bias, the kind that infuses large language models and generates the weighted grain within datasets that AIs are trained on. It is important to have awareness of and assume responsibility for the ramifications of a tilted axis in any technological framework. Often no one contemplates how two minds can use the same word so divergently that they lead to two completely different outcomes. This is frequently why we are blindsided by Black Swan events.
In a recent investor meeting, I was asked, "What are you looking for in an investor?" I was quick to own and reinforce my bias, "That when I say the word slug, you picture a small slithering invertebrate and not a shotgun cartridge." I believe everyone should take pause to find their creepy crawly, because when left unchecked and unclaimed, it has some calamitous consequences.
In “The New Earth,” Eckhart Tolle describes enlightenment as attainable only through unlearning, that it occurs only through moments of complete presence and witnessing during which connection and relationship occur without labels and judgment. A quiet instant with a leaf spent in silence and stillness, just being with the leaf, without identifying it or working it out, can unveil the fundamental truth of the universe.
Nature inspires this intimacy of stillness and silence without effort. Nature evokes presence, as it is always unfurling in the present tense. With the next deep breath you draw, if you took the time to be with what matters, and what provides for us without expectation, daily, and experience even a second of humility and gratitude toward all this wondrously strange living biota that envelops us, you would be able to reclaim your true and infinite essence. To preserve wild is to preserve our most convenient path to self actualisation.
Given the stakes, how could we not aspire to find a slug to barter a breath with? Slug, firefly, carinal, wolf or a wild flower on a meadow, take a moment to understand the full context of your expression, by profoundly linking to an organism that had to come into being, so you eventually could.
In receiving and knowing a life form you would normally dismiss as completely different from you, you will come to receive and know your whole self for the first time.
This is not an act of performance or alignment with purpose, but a simple reverence that stems from making room for all that you discriminated as external to your self and apart from you, as within your self and a part of you. To assimilate that which you previously alienated is the greatest meditation. So go on, find your slug!
