Buster the Crab

For me, in my journey, Barbara Kingsolver's sturdy and adaptable hermit crab, Buster (High Tide In Tuscon), has been instructor, mentor, model, friend...

If you are not familiar with Kingsolver's anthology of essays, and Buster in particular, the short version of the story is this:

Kingsolver, on a trip to the Bahamas, collected a variety of shells for her young daughter. Upon arriving home to Tuscon, it turned out that one of the shells was actually home to a hermit crab, subsequently named, Buster... Buster was given an aquarium home far from his familiar ocean, and life proceeded apace. Except that Buster seemed to display periods of depression interspersed with manic episodes that no one could explain. It turned out, eventually, that Buster was responding, in ways that no one fully understood to what would be tidal patterns in Tucson, Arizona -- hence: High Tide in Tuscon...

Like Buster, I sometimes feel myself ripped from an environment I understood, thrust by forces larger than myself into a strange and foreign world. Like Buster, I am sometimes hard pressed to adapt, responding to tides I cannot see, but only feel. Like Buster, I am reduced to being what Kingsolver calls "a good animal." Here, in this life that is mine now, my responses are more primal, simpler, less tied to the life that was. Here, I am simply present in my world. Finding what is and fitting myself into what is given. Buster finds his home in the place where he is. Some days there is quiet, some days there is intense wildness. Always there is sure knowledge that we are simply who we are called to be. Nothing more. Nothing less.

swan