A Prayer for the Least Among Us
Details. The all-important details. Some say the devil hides there, in minutiae easily dismissed as inconsequential and beneath notice. Aspects of the whole so small as to escape importance.
I didn't think much about insects. Unless they were biting me or extraordinarily beautiful I didn't give them much consideration. They were inconsequential details that didn't merit my intellectual or spiritual real estate.
I get caught up in angst about the suffering of the charismatic species driven to extinction, and grieve the ecosystems brutalized by anthropogenic climate change. I am perpetually grief-stricken about the disappearance of polar ice and all of the life forms that depend on it. Mass die-offs like the drowning of an entire generation of Emperor Penguin chicks winter before last. There was too much meltwater standing on top of the ice so that rather than learning to walk the chicks fell in and drowned. This leaves me inexpressibly sad. It's the big picture stuff that has kept me gutshot. The Greenland Ice Sheet, so rapidly sliding into the ocean, that will raise sea levels worldwide. Desertification, particularly for those of us who already live on the edge of a desert, is terrifying. It is predicted that my beloved Desert Southwest home will be uninhabitable in less than fifty years. And yes, I grieve for us too. For my people. The extreme social injustice accompanying global climate change is the collective shame of our species.
Insects were the least of it.
Until they didn't show up. Until the tragedy of climate change came home. Until we started experiencing climate-change-driven 'drier than average' springs here on the edge of the Colorado Plateau in the arid American Southwest.
* * *
“If all humankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed 10,000 years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.”
E. O. Wilson, Harvard Entomologist
Meadow is probably an altogether too generous term for the one-acre clearing I live on the verge of, but that's what I call it. One of the magical things about life on the verge of a little meadow is coming to life with it in spring after the cold sluggishness of winter's doldrums.
When me and my meadow begin to resurrect after exceptionally warm, dry winters, there is a crucial element missing. Lack of adequate winter moisture here results in a painful lack of insects in spring. When we get good snow grasshoppers part in front of me as I stroll the meadow like the Red Sea before Moses, and crickets sing me to sleep as soon as the nights are above freezing.
It's an odd thing, the absence of a sound. As I sought sleep after those dry winters, my mind wandered the spring meadow looking for my cricket lullaby without finding it. My dreams and I had been abandoned. There were no dead houseflies to vacuum from the windowsills on cleaning day.
Nothing was as it should be in consequence of the absence of insects. The plenty of the meadow was no more. My beloved Flycatchers, who nest here every summer, searched desperately for food. The vigorous hatchlings customarily clamoring for parental attention from the nest in the eaves just outside my dining room window were so feeble I could hardly hear them. Nobody in the meadow was eating what—who—they usually did.
I have been enchanted with the local Corvid species here for the length and breadth of my life and know them to be intelligent, opportunistic omnivores. The Corvid clan is not above robbing the nests of others, but I could have gone my whole life without seeing it. Images of the titanic battle waged at the Flycatcher nest will haunt my nightmares evermore. For all their valiant efforts against a pair of birds twice their size, the Flycatcher parents only managed to save one of their three hatchlings from marauding Steller's Jays. The Jays ate the two Flycatcher babies they pulled from the nest down to the last feather, for which I am grateful. I would otherwise have had to pick up the remains of my precious baby birds and conduct a funeral for them. The very thought makes me choke.
Raptors are elegant predators. The strike usually breaks the back of their prey, paralyzing it, and then their sharp talons finish the job as their feet grasp their dinner and take off with it. The death of Raptor prey is most often swift and merciful.
The Corvids are inelegant predators. For want of their customary fare —insectivorous lizards and grasshoppers—in a dry spring the Corvidae here go for larger prey. I watched a Crow pull a gopher out of its burrow by the face. Who knew gophers could scream? There was nothing swift or merciful about the gopher's death. The Crow didn't wait until the gopher was dead to start eating. I turned away so I didn't have to watch, but it didn't save me. The screaming was intense for a very long time and then ceased abruptly.
You would think that someone who has studied as much Biology as I have would have kept a closer emotional eye on the base of the pillar, on the foundation of all the ecological interrelationships that rest upon it. But I am vulnerable to the drama about losses at the top. The panicky reports that browbeat me daily. The horror of cetaceans washing up on the beach, dead from ingesting plastic. Or the kids standing outside the grocery store selling candy bars to save the polar bears. The news that one of the last jaguars had been shot on the Arizona/Mexico border for his pelt was a knife in my heart. The starving polar bears and the tragically persecuted wolves. The list is endless these days.
These crunchy dry climate change springs here in the meadow are reeducating me about the interrelated nature of ecology. The tuition is gruesome. Collapse occurs from the bottom up.
Humanity lacks the vocabulary to adequately discuss the climate change happening around us in any kind of meaningful way, at least in my colonial language. Perhaps First Nations languages have words big enough, but mine doesn't. Meteorologists try to give us a grasp of the enormity of increasingly common catastrophic weather events by explaining them in temporal terms. Hurricanes Irma and Harvey in 2017 were spoken of as 50-year storms. This language is useless at best, counterproductive at worst. The time spans used to describe these massive weather events are the product of actuarial tables—more an expression of percent probability than any kind of meaningful significance. These tepid terms don't convey the life-changing fury of the storms they attempt to describe. It isn't as though Puerto Rico doesn't have to worry about another Irma-scale event for another fifty years.
Sometimes we try to describe our new climate in relative terms. What constitutes 'customary' now? What is the 'normal' weather pattern? What shall we count as a 'drier than average' season from the depths of this persistent drought? My homeland has been in a greater or lesser state of drought for the past 30 years. Will we consider a winter dry in comparison to the winter of 2017/2018? Or dry in comparison to what was considered dry before 2017-2018?
It is an odd thing, the absence of a sound. In summer, by day, my heart and spirit wander the meadow seeking birdsong. I am left wanting. I have lived beside my little one-acre meadow for a very long time and predictably experience Rachel Carson's dreaded Silent_Spring two years out of every five now. The pesticides she feared would kill the birds are doing so, but indirectly, by killing their food source in an increasingly harsh environment without adequate moisture for birds or insects either one to survive
* * *
Redemption lies in the details as well.
A Prayer for the Least Among Us
Gaia, Great Goddess, I Cast my fear, anger, and self-loathing into the blistering, punishing Summer Solstice sun to wane with the season. I do not offer prayers for the salvation of my own kind this Litha as I customarily do. You have blessed us with all the resources and abilities we need to save ourselves from ourselves. My prayers this Summer Solstice are for the least among us, for those who are the base of the pillar. Few have been so maliciously and persistently persecuted by humanity as insects. I understand now it is they who tie the world together. Save them, Mother, from me and my kind if you can. I pray for enough moisture that they might survive. All we know — the might and majesty of all of Creation — rests on their tiny shoulders.
I never thought I'd miss bugs, Gaia. I never thought about them at all, save for that occasional beautiful butterfly, or perhaps the heartbeat of compassion I felt for the housefly that bounced itself to death against my window. In keeping with Your tradition, even in a dry year, the passing of the Summer Solstice sees the humidity increase in my arid homeland, and it offers the tender stirring of hope for summer monsoon moisture. I pray for nourishing and spectacular summer rainstorms. I never thought I'd be so grateful to hear the whine of a mosquito in my ear, or be so willing to send her on her way with wishes for prosperity and a drop of my lifeblood.
This prayer recognizes that we—the human beings of planet earth—will be required to learn how to live in amiable peace with our fellow travelers on this blue dot hurtling through the black if we want to survive ecocide. Our fellow travelers include everyone, human and nonhuman alike. Mother Earth will continue to turn up the volume until we learn this. The tuition gets expensive from here.
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additional photography by:
Andreas Weith, CC BY-SA 4.0
Charles J. Sharp, CC BY-SA 4.0
James Gathany, USCDCP, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
To the Life in Pieces writing circle for reading an early draft of this oh, so long ago.
And to Gaia, Mother Earth, who has created life on this planet in such spectacular diversity. We offer our gratitude to the insect clans; to the moths and mosquitos who feed our beloved bats; to the pollinators who fertilize the world; to the ants who feed the lizards; and to the lizards and grasshoppers and worms who feed the birds; and to the prairie dogs and all the other nonhuman keystone species humans kill so thoughtlessly. There are no extra parts in the natural world and we offer our gratitude to all of the folk, human and otherwise, who are thought of as ‘lesser’ and who tie the world together in so many ways.
Terryl Warnock is an eccentric with a happy heart who lives on the outskirts of town with her cat. She is known as an essayist, proof reader, editor, maker of soap, and proud pagan. A lifetime student, she has pursued science, religion, and sustainable communities. This, plus life experience from the local community service to ski instructor, from forest service worker to DMV supervisor, from hospitality to business owner gives her a broad view on the world.
Terryl is the author of:The Miracle du jour, ISBN-10: 0989469859, ISBN-13 : 978-0-9894698-5-2
AJ Brown, in a past life, was an embedded systems engineer (digital design engineer). He worked on new product designs from hard disk controllers, communication protocols, and link encryptors to battery monitors for electric cars.
A few years ago he surrendered his spot on the freeway to someone else. Now he is more interested in sailing, building out his live-in bus for travel, and supporting the idea of full-circle food: the propagation, growth, harvest, storage, preparation, and preservation of healthy sustenance. He is a strong supporter of Free/Libre Open Source Software[F/LOSS] and is willing to help most anyone in their quest to use it.
Together, we are MoonLit Press.