ACTIVE MORNING IN THE TULSI GARDEN

ACTIVE MORNING IN THE TULSI GARDEN

     I have had some fear that the large green lizard I have seen moving about in the trees and bushes may be a threat to Tulsi. Some lizards like the little brown ones eat the bugs and are helpful servants but these large green ones, this one is about a foot long (and looks like the Geico Gekko) is a staunch vegetarian. Today during japa I saw he had chosen to climb a thin branch of a nearby oleander…the only branch that hangs low over Tulsi's garden and is now blooming just above Tulsi.

     He moves very slowly most of the time and blends in perfectly with the leaves. His body looks a little like a big leaf when he just sits. So what is his plan? Sure enough he slid down the very tip of the thin branch. Is he going to eat the flowers? No. But I see the weight of his body is pulling the thin oleander branch to “almost” within touching distance of the top of Tulsi.

     The Tulsi garden is surrounded by a flimsy fence made from bird net which is fine for keeping the peacocks out. None of the creatures want to mess with bird net because it gets stuck on just about anything that it comes into contact with. Can be a real problem for feathers. If this lizard figures out how flimsy this netting is and that he can very easily just crawl under it we will have a big problem for protecting Tulsi.

For now his plan has been foiled, the branch would not come down far enough by his weight alone so he could taste the Tulsi leaves meant for Krishna. He jumped from the thin branch into the nearby cherimoya tree. There is so much vegetation here for him to eat, but that Tulsi garden must look very attractive to him.

When the flowering oleander branch finishes blooming its offering to Tulsi I will prune it off.

     There was a lot of activity this morning. That wasn’t the only creature that came by Tulsi's garden. A medium sized garden snake stopped by to see if there were any lizards for him to eat. The small lizards could be seen scattering here and there as the snake moved along the ground. He saw me sitting chanting japa and watched and listened for a few minutes… motionless, head in the air. When I moved my japa beads and they made a crackling sound he swiftly slithered away.

     The small brown lizards were interesting too. There is at least one family of small brown lizards, the bug-eaters, that live inside the bird net protected area. What happened next I'd never seen before in reptiles and didn’t know reptiles could behave this way. A large brown lizard ran after a small one that tried to run out from the protected area and caught it in her mouth, by what looked like “the back of the neck.” I thought maybe the big one will eat the little one, like fishes do. But not so. She carried the little one back into the protected area and up to the top of one of the fence posts. She held the little one in her mouth like that for quite some time and then let it go. The little one ran back into the protected area and into a space between two of the wall stones.

Mother and child?

     Ever amazing… the universal principles of Krishna. There is nothing that is not Krishna in one form or another. If we can see like that we will never be away from Krishna. 

Update 1: This lizard is not a vegetarian. So Tulsi is safe and the lizard will help protect her.

Update 2: The activity between the large brown lizard and the small one may have been mating.
The larger one the male and smaller one the female. 

In any case Krishna is still everywhere. And although we may see Krishna everywhere, "this material world is no place for a lady or a gentleman."