Resistance

I've been enacting a practice of waking up at 6:30 every morning. This follows the practice of not going to bed until I feel sleepy. It's been working really well, with a maximum delay in rousing of about 15 minutes. So, I was up again before the village music broadcasts, studying, eating, and organizing, all before 8:00 - which is when I decided to put my futon away and hang up a pair of jeans from the previous day.

I put away the futon without any problem. But when I went to open the sliding door where my clothes hang, I got some resistance. I pushed harder, but the resistance was still there. I thought perhaps the door had caught on some fabric from the inside of the closet (this has happened before), so I checked all around the lower parts of the door. Only after I looked up did I discover what was causing the friction: a gecko.

The sliding doors are designed to fit inside a deep groove at the top, resting on a slick material on the bottom, allowing for pretty silent and efficient use. To fit in the deep top groove, the door has what I would describe as "guides," thin, spaced sheets of metal that extend to fill the deep groove, keeping the door on track. Now, imagine thin, metal guides set in a deep groove, moving rapidly over the body of a trapped gecko. You now have an image of what I saw this morning.

Once I became aware of what was happening, I stopped moving the door. I stepped back and went to get a paper towel. Before I removed the door to extract the little beasts body, I found parts of his tail that had been severed and fallen to the ground. I picked them up then removed the door from its frame. His body fell to the tatami with soft plop, small amounts of blood present. I bent down to see how bad he was. Very. His body was mangled, heart and other organs protruding from his chest and abdomen. Most disturbing of all, parts of his body were moving slowly yet erratically. I picked him up, wrapped in the paper towel, and put an end to it all. He stopped moving.

While I'm not one to participate in ceremony, I just didn't feel right throwing him in the burnable garbage. Bodily incineration doesn't bother me (cremation, if you will), but surrounded by a bagful of trash, which might not leave my house for several weeks? So I took him out back, scooped a little dirt from the area I'm trying to cultivate as an azalea garden, and placed him in the earth. I came back inside to put the door back and wipe the tatami. I found a few remnants, mostly tail, and discarded them as well.

I remember hearing that geckos are 家の神様 ie no kamisama "gods of the house." Hopefully, the accidental destruction of one of their kind doesn't bring about any sort of retribution.