Wasps

Life is profoundly unfair. Perhaps where humans are most different from the other animals is how we (some of us anyway) feel a distinct irony in the fact that collectively, we want everything to be fair and rosy, but in fact, life requires that we perform differently.

I tend to leave my lawn, the borders, and trimmings fairly untended, happy to leave it to the wild things. Every now and then, however, I'm struck by an impulse, a first cousin to the desires of frontier women to dress up their humble stick and mud abodes with lace curtains. My impulse drags me to garden, to try and make order out of the imperturbable chaos that is Nature. Silly me. But so it is, and so I venture to pull out weeds that I have no sense of, as a bulldozer to a primeval forest. Suddenly, thwack! - into the poison oak and a nest of ground wasps!

Must kill (innocent) wasps, and tear out threatening poison oak (a relatively pretty looking plant that suddenly takes on a wicked witch like cast)!

I pick up the pesticide and gird myself to dig out the poison oak. This mundane suburban vignette illuminates a human irony. For what has the wasp done but try and build a home? What has the poison oak done but what all plants do at all times - live and grow? Suddenly, strangely, the actions of all who have come before make some sense - killing, maiming, tearing down, destruction....all in the name of some ideal or other, but at the end, it is a fear and a desire to control. And yet, we all wish fervently for peace, harmony, and an end to struggling and strife. That’s what we all profess to want. We can’t have it. We are not in Eden, but cast outside of it, and while our hearts were formed in Paradise and we retain so many paradisical yearnings, Paradise is not where we live. We live on earth, grimy, wasp-ridden, poison oak-bearing, lovely earth.

What do we do with such knowledge? It can be enough to make people crazy – I think it does, quietly, and often, not so quietly. I see it when I look into people’s eyes sometimes, at the checkout counters, in the streets. People go about their proscribed lives, knowing from the bottom of their soles/souls, that the borders of their lives are identical to those of soap bubbles.

What would you teach your children, knowing that this world they go into is as much soap bubbles as it is milk, honey, asphalt, steel, gold, and terror?