In the morning it’s fun to go outside
and check the back screen door and window
to see who’s napping.
Moths fly about all night
in the porchlight
then must fall in exhaustion on the screen,
window ledge
and sleep most of the day there.
Tiny orange ones.
A lovely yellow one with a pink line across the wings
and fancy, fanned antennae.
Tiny nondescript ones -
are they babes?
A giant black, charcoal and white one.
Some with dramatic geometric markings.
A grayish one with wings
like airplane wings.
A gray one with just a hint
of turquoise in its wings.
Flat ones.
Sticky-outy ones.
There,
all together,
a magnificent array.
Most of the glimpses of immortality, design and benevolence that I see come from the natural world – from the seasons, from the beauty, from the intermeshed fabric of decay and life, and so on. Other signs exist as well, such as instances of great and selfless love between people, but these, perhaps, are less reliable. They hint at epiphany, not at the eternity that nature proclaimed. If this seems a banal notion, that is exactly my point. The earliest gods we know about were animals – tigers, birds, fish. Their forms and faces peer out from ancient ruins, and from the totems and wall paintings of our first religions.
And though, as time went on, we began to give our gods human features, much feeling still adheres to the forests and fields and birds and lions – else why should we moan about the ‘desecration’ of our environment? I am a reasonably orthodox Methodist, and I go to church on Sunday because fellowship matters, because I find meaning in the history of the Israelites and in the Gospels, and because I love to sing hymns. But it is not in ‘God’s house’ that I feel {divine} presence most – it is in {God’s} outdoors, on some sun-warmed slope of pine needles or by the surf. It is there that the numbing categories {humans} have devised to contain this mystery – sin and redemption and incarnation and so on – fall away, leaving the overwhelming sense of the goodness and the sweetness at work in the world.
– Bill McKibben, The End of Nature
Right there on the back porch
by the back door
was a spider
that got my attention.
It was black and bulbous
and its legs could become hairy.
I wondered if it was a baby tarantula.
Suddenly,
a beautiful wasp walked up to it.
It was reddish-orange
with a bright, shiny, blue set of wings.
It seemed very bold
walking up to this spider,
but then I wouldn’t know who had the strongest defense.
I’d seen the spider move – ever so slightly -
a couple of its legs.
After a bit,
the wasp latched onto the spider
and started hauling it away.
Now I began to wonder if I’d really seen
those legs move.
Maybe the spider was dead.
The wasp moved right along,
as if the spider weighed nothing.
It carried it up over the bottom of the screen door.
I was amazed,
and then alarmed:
that wasp backed into the corner of the screen door
and carried the spider into my house!
I opened the door,
grabbed a fly swatter
and gently, with the end of it,
flung the spider back outside.
The wasp couldn’t figure out what happened
and looked quite a while for that spider,
which lay perfectly still on the porch.
I carefully maneuvered the fly swatter under it
and laid it beneath a tomato plant,
in the shade,
where,
I’m certain,
I saw the legs move again,
though it stayed exactly where I laid it.
An hour later,
it was still there.
This morning,
gone.
All kinds of questions:
was the spider alive?
If so, what was its plan?
Was it pretending to be dead?
Was it at the mercy of the wasp or
was it going to eat the wasp at an opportune moment?
What happened to it?
Is it still alive?
Was it a baby
or full-grown?
And what right did I have to interfere?
I know the answer to that one:
none really -
and I wouldn’t have,
had they not gone into the house.
Familiar issue:
how does the natural world get along
with humans in it?
