Waspish Philosophy

When I was fourteen or so, yellowjackets made a nest in the mortar of the brickwork of my window. This allowed them passage to my room, and I would come in most nights to find a pair circling my ceiling light, long legs dragging at the air in their confusion. Once one got caught in my hair, and kept trying to crawl out, buzzing angrily. I was terrified of yellowjackets and all their winged stingy brethren for years.

I don't know how related it is now. There's something in me that will sometimes see a hornet and squash it, just because it's a hornet.

And there's something in me that'll see one, and leave it alone, and watch it, and tell other people to leave it alone, until it flies away.

And then I'll find one bumbling slowly on the streetcorner of the crosswalk I take from work to my car, obviously slowed down because of the cold, where he's going to get stepped on. And there's something in me that crouches down and studies him for a bit, and then remembers that I have a sandwich box and carefully opens the box to scoop this little creation into it. And take it home with me.

I don't know why. Maybe because it's clearly at the end of life, and I think it's better to die warm then cold. Maybe because I'm tired of things dying, even when they're tiny. Maybe because I learn something from new experiences. Maybe because I think it shouldn't die because someone just didn't see it and didn't know it was there. Maybe it's the years of training that mean you help an animal in trouble.

But is it helping at all? He's more active when he's warm, certainly, and he's got food in there (assuming that a yellowjacket can make use of breadcrumbs and honey drips). But he's still going to die, at some point. Would it have been better to just relocate him to someplace he wouldn't get stepped on, but that would still be somewhat normal for him? Let's face it - Glad Plastic isn't exactly their home environment.

I'm philosophizing about a hornet as though it's a dog. All of this makes sense for bringing home a stray dog. These guys, it's a bug? Who cares? It's little, and there's billions more of them than there are of us. And they don't live long enough to invest too much time in one.

Says a girl who wants to work NICU someday.

Watching him explore around, now that he's warm enough to move properly again. He seems more like a machine than a creation - he's too perfect. Isn't that odd? I expect created things to have things wrong with them - they stumble, they get injured, they have physical quirks. If a machine is less than perfect, it gets chucked and replaced with a perfect one. I don't know enough about the species, maybe this one is somehow flawed, but I would have to observe a lot of others to know that. Weird. The fingerprint of something being made by the flawed creature is that it measures up to the design standard, and the fingerprint of something being made by the perfect is that it doesn't.

Or maybe it's the fingerprint of something being made by the forgiving. Where we'd chuck a machine that doesn't work, we're so loved that we're forgiven for not working the way we were designed, and

I've caught and held other creations. A hamster. A cricket. My beloved. My little almost-nephew. The cat. I guess you can't really hold a horse. I've dissected different animals after they're dead. And I wonder about the concept of the life-spark. How small it must be to be contained in this insect, and yet lend life throughout the entire magnificence of my beloved's body. I can't make it. I can theorize about a way of taking tissues and stretching and reconstructing them to the point of making a body, mimicking the wondrous art of creation. But I can't make life. I can probably conceive, but I don't know how to do it - what I could possibly do to make the difference between a new life and a stillborn.

Those two wings, rising from his back, barely an inch long, give him a gift that I don't have, and could never emulate. I can play the piano, I can hold a baby, I can run, and laugh. He can fly. I don't know that it's something to envy, so much as something to observe. Different abilities, but his seems all the more fantastic because it's something that I don't have, never will, and no one in the history of my species has had.

Can an insect feel joy? Anyone can see a dog's joy in running across a field, and running right back to you because you're the light in his world. Dogs have a lot of light in their worlds. I've had people tell me that I'm the light in theirs, sometimes. It's part of where the name "Phirefly" comes from. Does something so small have the same capacity for inner light, or just base its world off of the sun? Does flying bring him more joy?

It's a warm day. Much warmer than it's been all week. I could let him go today, and he could fly. He's miles from wherever his home must be, and he'll die tonight when the cold comes down again. Or he'll get caught and eaten by something else out there. I could keep him in the box for a few more days, and he'd live longer. There's some point in life-ethics where the line of quality of life clashes against the quantity of life, and you're stuck with trying to figure out which one to pursue.

I wrote most of this at noon, thinking things through. Took him outside, pried the lid free, leaving him room to climb out. Watched him take off in a big arc, legs dragging at the air, covering a huge distance for something so tiny. Felt better. Went off to Oxbow and climbed around for four hours.