Honey to the Ear

As recent posts may have indicated, I am in the mood for poetry. And today, having run across a most beautiful piece by one of my favorite poets, I felt obliged to share it here.

Vultures

Like large dark
lazy
butterflies they sweep over
the glades looking
for death,
to eat it,
to make it vanish,
to make of it the miracle:
resurrection. No one
knows how many
they are who daily
minister so to the grassy
miles, no one
counts how many bodies
they discover
and descend to, demonstrating
each time the earth’s
appetite, the unending
waterfalls of change.
No one,
moreover,
wants to ponder it,
how it will be
to feel the blood cool,
shapeliness dissolve.
Locked into
the blaze of our own bodies
we watch them
wheeling and drifting, we
honor them and we
loathe them,
however wise the doctrine,
however magnificent the cycles,
however ultimately sweet
the huddle of death to fuel
those powerful wings.

– Mary Oliver

Insect Affinity?

I’ve never minded bugs but was never exactly fond of them, either. If they were outside minding their own business we got along fine, but indoors they were fair game and I can’t imagine how many have expired under my command. But it seems that lately I’m becoming more and more tolerant of them. This is not true for ticks, chiggers, mosquitoes, eye-diving gnats, biting flies, and other annoying pests, which still receive the business ends of fly-swatters, newspapers, bug-zappers, and hands. I mean “regular” old bugs. Beetles and crickets and that sort.

When I recently ran across a millipede in the house, I scooped it up and released it outside instead of squashing it as I probably would have last year. Late one night I discovered a large beetle in the trash can (someone else threw him away, alive) and I simply could not leave him there to suffer under the dirty diapers, plastic wrappers, and empty cans that would inevitably follow. So I grimaced, dug him out of the garbage, and set him on his way outside. Only to find his twin (or mate?) crouching at the edge of my bed. So I took that one out, too, and wished them both well. I’ve shooed black wasps and dirt-dobbers to safety, plucked ants out of danger, scooped moths from sure death, and twice rescued the same large gray bug from an unhealthy curiosity of seats.

I don’t know why. They are just insects. They are one of the most successful breeding groups the Earth has ever seen, without the lure of soft fur and innocent eyes, without the loving minstrations of a human populace. Perhaps I like their blind determination. Maybe I sometimes feel like a bug myself, trying to avoid that great windshield of the unexpected. Maybe it began as a kid when I was careful to place the wooly bears and caterpillars I played with back in safe places after I finished playing. Perhaps it had something to do with a movie where a holy man would not knowingly injure so much as a worm – even when undertaking a construction project – because, he said, all life was important.

Yesterday a large moth landed in my hair. One thing that bothers me a lot is something messing about in my hair. But instead of being annoyed and trying to immediately flip him out, I just let him walk around. I was enjoying the morning coolness on the front porch, in no hurry to really start the day, and I decided to let him take his time as long as he “behaved.” For a while he barely moved and I thought perhaps he’d flown away without my knowing. But then, no, I felt him shift and suddenly he was crawling down the side of my face. Again I had the urge to brush him away but resisted. His feet tickled. His wings were soft. And he meant no harm. So I left him be, perching on my cheek for a few moments before trundling down my neck (he tickled so that I had to laugh just a little). He walked halfway down the front of my shirt then paused, and I was better able to inspect him.

I can’t say he was a beautiful moth, not in the way that some are colorful and patterned to rival butterflies, but he had lovely little bands on his legs and a dark mottling that was itself quite intricate with little dabs of white and orange. He was pretty. And he seemed to be a bit lost, or perhaps was just out exploring a bit in the early morning. At any rate, he wasn’t bothering me so I made no attempt to bother him. He soon fluttered away, having rested up or spotted a cozy-looking tree or finished exploring the unfamiliar geography of the front porch’s latest addition. I bade him well and was glad I hadn’t simply brushed him off. It was an interesting and pleasant experience.

Perhaps I am just beginning to look a bit closer at the world around us, of which insects are an integral part. In the grand picture, I am hardly more than a bug myself, so maybe this is a sort of newfound empathy for small things in a large, confusing, and often hostile world. I don’t know. But I like it. And I think that this search for beauty unexpected is revealing a surprising amount of beauty everywhere … even, perhaps, in me.

Of Beauty and Butterflies

I went hiking the other day. It was breezy but warm and the nicest day we’d had for a stretch, and I wanted to get out and enjoy it. So I went to a bit of national woods not far away and walked a trail I’ve been through several times but had not visited in years. Much was the same, of course, and much was different.

An ice storm this winter hit the area hard. The trail often diverted from its original route to bypass tangles of downed trees and even where it did not divert there were colonies of stumps wearing skirts of sawdust. Some of the oldest trees in the area lay on the ground in cross-crossing lines with their roots in the air. It was almost painful to walk through. But there were protected areas, pristine little pockets behind hillsides and sweeping ridgelines, sheltered from the wind that accompanied the ice and caused most of the damage. In one of these pockets I stopped to rest.

A large shelf of rock spotted with mosses and lichens ran exposed through a narrow meadow-like opening on the steep hillside. It made an excellent seat. Surrounded by oak and pine, cedar and hickory, it was perfectly calm and flooded with warm mid-day sunshine. A small bronze-colored lizard with long dark stripes peeked out from under a tiny overhang in the rock that I hadn’t even noticed beforehand but vanished when I finally had to shift on my stone seat. A large patch of wildflowers swarmed the lower end of the clearing where the shelf of rock melted back into dark earth, violets and sheep shire, buttercups and phlox, false garlic and bluets scattered on the ground like confetti. Among their bright blooms, which drifted into the woods amid lazy sunbeams like something straight out of a Thomas Kincade painting, a few little butterflies hovered and flitted. Some were solid yellow, others colorfully spotted, and the smallest of them were white with orange piping at the edges of their wings. They tasted this blossom, then that one, seemingly unable to choose a favorite, dancing from one spring buffet to the next.

“They get to live their whole lives here,” I mused. “All they will ever know is this tiny paradise.”

I envied them. Beautiful and perfect, they danced on air. Their lives were short but enchanted, if only for one untainted afternoon. But, then, so was mine. I sighed and moved on, climbing farther and farther up the hilll until the trail broke out of the woods and wound the narrow edge of a bluff high above the crystal clear creek I had left just below the parking area. It was a lovely vista, a wide panorama of the creek valley and hills beyond, all broken ranges and steep hollows just beginning to don the golden-green cloak of spring. Redbuds flamed in purple brilliance and dogwoods floated like drifts of snow in the trees. I tried to soak it in, memorize every wrinkle of the hills, every sharp edge of rimrock, every curve of the creek so I could pull the memory out for later use and relive the simple glory of stillness and spring on a rocky bluff outcrop. I think I managed pretty well.

So now, even on long dark days when the sun does not shine for me, I can recall these memories and cling to the knowledge that it is not only butterflies who dance in the air and lead lives full of beauty.