I’ve recently claimed banana slugs as my power animal. If you aren’t familiar with them, they are large, bright yellow (sometimes brownish) slugs found in the Pacific coastal rainforest belt of Northern California. They are essentially shell-less snails on steroids that move through the world somewhere around 6 inches per minute.
Banana slugs are regal and elegant when you get down and get a good look at them. Their supple, iridescent bodies glisten and ripple like water, and their tentacle gestures rival any belly dancer’s arm movements. But more than once I’ve mistaken one for a fresh dog turd. Isn’t that how it goes? I do that with myself all the time—mistake my brilliance for shit. Yet the shapes and textures we come in are what both emit and obscure our radiance.
The banana slug is what I fear. Slow, lowly, completely vulnerable. Not a bone in its body. It’s stuck in the realm of feet. The closest it will get to being elevated in the grand scheme of things is when a crow snatches it up in its beak and flies to a high perch to gobble it up. No way. That’s not the life I’ve been told to live. I have aspirations to soar. I want to reach the heights of accomplishment—publish many books, become a highly paid, sought after speaker and teacher. Being unhurried and pedestrian are symptoms of laziness or inability, right?
In America, you’re supposed to be an eagle, a creature of prey swooping and diving through the sky eyeing with precision all that’s available for the taking. But only once have I ever seen a wild eagle live. And I’ve spent most of my life living in eagle habitat. In the redwood forests where I live now, I see banana slugs all the time. Sure some are a pile of mucus squashed by an oblivious jogger or the wheel of my own car, but prevalence in nature tells us something about what it takes to survive.
Author, researcher, and inspirational speaker, Brené Brown says, “vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity, and change.” That means vulnerability is not only essential to our survival, but also our ability to thrive. So maybe being a banana slug isn’t as demoralizing as I once thought. Slowing down, becoming soft, and losing my rigidity to have to be “something” or “someone” of lofty proportions can bring about a whole new perspective. Bankruptcy and foreclosure have certainly taught me that.
In a banana slug’s world, the high and lonely sky where eagles dwell is traded for an infinite patch of populated, fertile ground. Each blade of grass, each rock or stick is a universe unto itself. Vastness becomes real, tangible—a surface to slither across—rather than the incomprehensible and limitless heights that I hope to someday reach with my aerial wingspan.
Sure I might get killed by the rubber sole of a Nike, picked off by a crow, or be destined to always have a clump of dirty debris dangling from my butt, but the experience would be nothing less than sensational. And as slow as banana slug move, they’re always gone when I go back to have another look. They obviously know how to get somewhere in no hurry. I could use a little more of that.