pleasure of compassion with larisa schuckle + tadpoles!

ESSAY EIGHT: "TADPOLES"

I watch them. The tiny ones. My tiny ones. She has left them here, gone away. I sit on the leaf. I let my babies grow.

My eye. One is my eye. I chase the crawling ones. One of them is my foot.

I can't remember a time before transformation. I know they will sprout legs like mine. Swim away. Then, walk. I know this was the same for me, but I've forgotten. What's it like to grow?

AFTERTHOUGHTS

The first time that I visited Vermont was to tour colleges I ultimately wouldn't be accepted to, but seeing them was part of imagining myself no longer a dependent. What it might be like to become...me? 

I'd idealized the land, the Green Mountains, the long drive through forests to arrive in the state. I imagined myself at one of the small colleges wrapped in scarves and thick winter boots.

I was excited when a good friend ended up making the state her home and we could have adventures together in the land, freer, it felt, as an adult to explore the hikes than I would've been as a teen housed in a dorm without a car. While I'm sure I'd seen tadpoles at some point in my life before one of the visits, the encounters weren't as memorable.

While my photos aren't great, watching the hybrid animals swim under the waterfall was a particular kind of pleasure, a hyperawareness to the temporal nature of change, heightening my attention to the fact that our bodies are changing daily.

For tadpoles, the shift from egg to tadpole may occur over a few days, then tadpole to frog in a few weeks. In slow motion videos on YouTube, I watch how their arms push through their skin, almost like they've been tucked away in an oversized t-shirt. Their tails swallow up into their bodies again, "a good food source," one narrator explains. And then, they are fully grown. They can move from water to land and back again. 

They've emerged.

A part of me longs for such a signal in my own life. As time feels increasingly collapsed, as precarity--which, yes, has always been there--feels to touch every aspect of life, there is something soothing about reflecting as an outsider on the perceived simplicity of a tadpole's transformation. The certainty that the process unfolds, that a fully formed creature emerges on the other side. Especially when transformation involves so much loss, so much so that they creature before and after is fully altered.

Sure, there are some tadpoles who don't make it. I learn in my slow motion YouTube research of the bugs and critters who feed on some of the frog eggs, and some of the larger tadpoles as they learn to swim. How brutal.

I learn too how the father frog is the one who guards the eggs after they are born, and I soften as I watch frogman as protector of the most vulnerable ones. Like everything in nature, it is complex.

That's why talking with Larisa Schuckle, a humane educator and owner of Glitter Thicket, a vegan cafe/gallery in the Hudson Valley, brought so much warmth to my heart. In our conversation we realize that we both decided to give up meat at the same age, around six years old, and how that choice shaped the trajectory of our imaginations. 

"I hope that when kids see more vegan options they're encouraged to hold onto that part of themselves--that compassionate instinct, and hope that they feel like that it does have a place," Larisa shares about her dream for Glitter Thicket, which recently celebrated its one year anniversary. "It's normal to feel like we should be protecting animals."

Larisa has made my last few birthday cakes, and the one above is from 2021 when I turned 29. The number had always felt sacred to me. Childhood friends texted me to delight, "You're 29!! It's your number" when I finally reached that age. Only as an adult did I explore the numerology and mythology around the number, learning it was the year the Buddha left his home to go on his spiritual journey. 

Some major changes did happen during that year. Not all of them comfortable, and no, I don't feel as though I am the same person. But, there are parts I hold onto. There are parts I've held onto since childhood, perhaps mapped most vividly in that I still don't eat meat. That I can't imagine ever changing that part of myself, nor would I want to. Only deepen it. 

I'm thinking of when Maya Angelou said, "most people don't grow up. Most people age. They find parking spaces, honor their credit cards, get married, have children, and call that maturity. What that is, is aging." I want to embrace that distinction. To shed what needs to be shed, to know that what is meant to stay always will.

For the rest? It makes a good food source.

Listen to the full episode of "Pleasure of compassion with Larisa Schuckle" here!

READING LIST: CHILD'S PLAY

I don't know how to write about pleasure, play, and holding all of the complexity that goes into each of these categories without recommending Ross Gay. Any of his books, but in particular Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, Be Holding, and The Book of Delights. I know he has a new book coming out in the fall, Inciting Joy, and I can't wait to discover what's inside. Might I recommend pre-ordering?

I'll be going away next week, so expect a bonus (early release) issue of the letter in your inbox later this week :).