They've cut down a couple of trees next door and this has evicted many furry little caterpillars who are now on a frantic exodus to find a new home. They're all over the place. They get inside. They lurk over doorways and wait for you to pass underneath so they can fall on your head. Well, okay, that hasn't happened but it's highly possible. The Labyrinth and I were talking about the difference between boys and girls a couple of days ago and yesterday I got to experience first hand the kind of destructive curiosity that is inherent in possibly every little boy. I stayed home for a couple of hours with the Labyrinth's Little Leo Cub, just us two, and in that time a number of ants and several caterpillars met their doom. The ants were put to the test of fire and the caterpillars were drowned. He was, I think, quite surprised by this. He didn't expect them to not be able to breathe water. But the evidence was plain. Half a dozen caterpillars, when sealed in a beer bottle filled with water for a good part of an hour will, in fact, become quite dead. He asked me if I was sad and I said, " A little." He said I could sing a sad song for the dead caterpillars (coz I was playing guitar as this was all happening). So I sang weezer's Butterfly song which I thought was quite appropriate. Yesterday I went outside with my mama's mason jar Caught a lovely butterfly When I woke up today Looked in on my fairy pet She had withered all away No more sighing in her breast I'm sorry for what I did I did what my body told me to I didn't mean to do you harm Every time I pin down what I think I want it slips away The ghost slips away...etc As I sang this dirge he observed that the situation was indeed sad, but fun too. I did nothing to prevent or interfere with the massacre, I even helped with some of the fire lighting. These were life forms that were going to meet death by insect spray in a matter of hours anyway. To my judgement it didn't seem to be a time to step in and put a stop to this little boy's notion of play, even though I saw it as unnecessarily and mindlessly destructive. But I'm a girl and this stuff seemed to be something little boys HAD to go through and, in fact, when I asked him why he was killing these things I think he said much the same thing: because he had to. It's a bit scary to think that this blatant disregard for life seems entirely natural to the young male human. He doesn't see anything wrong or very sad about it. And perhaps it is a learned thing to be sad for the loss of life. I don't know. But I remember reading somewhere that animals are without conscience, that when they kill for food or survival guilt doesn't enter their minds. Of course, bear in mind that animals eat when they're hungry and they try to go for non-violent conflict resolutions with other animals, for simple reasons of self-preservation. And yet, there are so many stories of an adult female of a large carnivorous species adopting the young of another species to replace her cubs that died. What is that? Surely that's evidence of something that goes beyond self-preservation. I've read recently that's it's not so much the age of a soul that makes it seems wiser or clueless, but the awareness of the soul. Time is a construct of the physical realm because it needs physical things to see it, like the journey of the earth around the sun or the movement of a delicate metal finger sweeping incrementally around a dial. But the larger part of you that exists on the non-physical plane (which a lot of people don't believe in because they can't get a reading when they measure it with their "science" but they forget that they're using physical instruments to measure something that's not physical... like, duh...) doesn't exist in the same place as time and therefore knows nothing of it and knows nothing of "age". It is its awareness that defines its world, along with what is right and what is wrong. So if the awareness of the soul influences the conscience of humans it must be that way for all living things since, at the truth of it, we're all the same thing. And so perhaps it is unquenchable curiosity mixed with blissful ignorance that compels a boy to drown furry little caterpillars and not feel remorse. When I say ignorance, I don't mean it in a bad way. It's just an observation, meaning a lack of certain knowledge. And I'm completely confident that at some stages of his lives the Little Leo Cub is not so little and neither so ignorant, and is more knowlageable than me on some things. Okay, I'm done with this for now. I don't know where that was all going. Just cataloguing some observations, I guess. k.

There are no comments to this entry.