Obeisant Nature?

There’s an expression that we self-centered humans tend to use, that refers to nature “obeying” certain laws. We don’t really mean it, but it tends to sound as if we’re saying that there is some force outside nature that had once inscribed laws, and then nature was forever obliged to comply with these absolute ordinances. It’s roughly analogous to my local lawmakers posting a rule about the maximum permitted speed on a stretch of road, and then expecting me to adhere to that limit. Someone “out there” is forcing me to obey.

We’ve got it backwards. There are no commands or orders to which nature submits. That’s our game. There are no codes that preordain how the natural world should behave. Nature just does her thing as she always has—in a simple, honest, direct, and elegant manner. And she does it the same every time. Nature is utterly dependable. She’s unlike me, who knows that the powers that be have created laws intended to constrain my driving speed; laws that I still occasionally decide to disobey. Nature is no lawbreaker—nor is she obeisant to any higher order. She just is.

We humans watch nature’s activities with awe, interest, and wonder. We look for patterns and logic to these events. We make up stories about them. When we find a pattern, we note the regularity; we observe the dependability. We try to express that dependability in hypotheses. If we come to feel that our hypotheses are valid as we watch over time, we boldly transform them into “laws.” We tend to forget that they are our laws, our theories, our equations. Moreover, we are amazed that these laws are so simple and elegant. (That’s why I love physics.)

Our ancestors observed the regularity of movements of the sun, moon, and other celestial bodies. They built structures that reflected that heavenly regularity. Later on, as our understanding grew, we delved ever deeper into nature’s ways. Isaac Newton observed those same celestial bodies and developed his famous (and simple) equation of universal gravity. That’s why the moon moves as it does… it obeys Newton’s “Law of Gravity”!

Yes, nature exhibits dependable and repeatable behavior—faithfully and consistently. But she’s not obeisant to any mandate. She’s just doing her thing—in a sacred and perfect manner. Can we appreciate and honor it for that?

Dew on a Spider's Web

The Meaning of Life

A question most every human has pondered goes something like, What is the meaning of life? Philosophers have waxed endlessly and debated vigorously, in their attempts at responses. Does life have a purpose? A significance? Is there an intention or reason for it all? Why is life like it is? Is there some goal, some objective to this existence?

It’s within the capacity of highly-conscious human beings to ponder these puzzles. We look within ourselves and wonder. We observe our world—peering into the past, experiencing the present, curious about what’s to come—and find ourselves asking, What’s it all about? Seeking order and meaning to the world, we look for a plan, a design, a higher purpose. We’re uncomfortable with the unknown. We want answers.

Part of our dilemma, I believe, is due to our propensity in the West for thinking dualistically. We sort things into good/bad, right/wrong, left/right. Thus, if we are unable to decide what the meaning of life is, we are prone to conclude that it has no meaning. If I can’t understand its purpose, maybe it has none?! But just because we can’t come up with an answer when a question is posed in a certain way, must we leap to an opposite conclusion?

Another problem with this question as it is posed is that we don’t even know how to measure meaning; and if we think we do, our measure is nothing more than subjective. One person’s meaningfulness is another’s worthlessness. What we thought was meaningful when we were in our twenties can seem pretty shallow after we cross the half-century line.

I tend to feel that an answer to the meaning of life question is well beyond us at this stage of humanity’s development—and may forever remain so. We don’t even know what life is; we can’t really define it and we’re ignorant of most of its manifestations on this little planet. (Biologists estimate that we’ve named only a tiny fraction of Earth’s species, let alone understand what they do.)

I think the question can be addressed, however, if I back away from considering all life and look in the mirror. How do I make my life meaningful? What gives my life purpose? The answer comes pretty easily: Serve my world. Help others. Try to see that my actions are done in the spirit of love and in a way that I do the least harm. Rather than endlessly pondering rhetorical questions, let me get on with the business of doing some good.

Heart of a Poppy

Fly Season—Part 2

My spouse is bedeviled by a similar bug: the buffalo gnat. Looking very much like the eye gnat, these pests are, however, very different… they bite! One might wonder how a little bug like this acquired the very large adjective “buffalo.” It seems that they were imported to Virginia from the eastern end of Lake Erie in 1894… no, that’s a joke. How about: they once were the main pest of the bison… no, that’s another joke. Really, the buffalo gnat gets its name from its little humped back—it’s like a miniature-winged buffalo! This gnasty gnat is related to the notorious black flies of the northern states, and like the notorious black fly, they have a vicious bite. They draw blood. They create itchy lumps on my spouse’s forehead and neck that bug her for days.

Why does one type of gnat choose me and another type go after her? I’m guessing it has something to do with the different smells we radiate. I’ll refrain from suggesting which one of us smells worse (or better, to the gnats) than the other. Mosquitoes go after her far more voraciously than me. Is it chemical or karma?

Finally comes the deer fly. It’s the size of a house fly, but rather than just tickle your neck, it bites, and it hurts! A deer fly will buzz wildly around your head, circling you at something in the vicinity of 90 mph. You might catch a fleeting glimpse of it now and then, but it’s moving far faster than any well-aimed swat could intercept. It circles and circles, wearing you down, and then lands on neck or ear and nips you.

The wound will seep blood, because deer fly spit has an anticoagulant in it. They and their later-summer cousin the horse fly can cause a cow or goat to become anemic, if they get many bites. My bug book tells me that deer flies are attracted to dark, moving shapes. So I guess I’m supposed to wear white and stand still, when one is on the prowl? Sorry.

It may sound like I’m complaining about these fly pests, when I list and describe their disagreeable habits—and I am, a bit, I guess. But I also have been around enough to know that every habitat has its pests—and our corner of the woods is less pestilent than many. I'm thankful for that.

Instead of complaining, I hope I’m really just trying to describe some of the challenging and interesting critters we have around here. I believe it helps me to put attention to and study these creatures, in order to learn what I can about their lives and habits and to get along with them. For one thing, this process shows me that their purpose in life is not solely to bedevil me, and that they may even have some beneficial qualities. That said, I can’t wait until fly season is over.

Enchanted Forest

Fly Season—Part 1

Around here we experience many more than just four seasons a year. I’ve written before (7/31/09) on the Celtic Cross-Quarter days, which are actually mini-seasons that arrive half-way between the solstices and equinoxes. So that makes eight seasons.

Then there are early and late times in the seasons. Early spring is a great anticipatory time for us, when we are forced into inactivity, as we eagerly await all the rebirths of the new year. In contrast, late spring becomes so full of activity that we hardly get a chance to pause between tasks of picking garden bounty, beating back weeds, and initiating outdoor projects that have been in the planning all winter.

But there’s a not-so-pleasant aspect to this time of late spring: it’s fly season. In another month or so we’ll be seeing grasshoppers, beetles, butterflies, katydids, crickets, and many other summer insects. This end-of-spring season, however, definitely belongs to the flies—all those critters of the order Diptera: mosquitoes, gnats, and myriad other types of flies.

There are some 17,000 species of flies in North America—ably filling countless flyly niches. They most often get a bad rap by us humans—by being associated with yucky things like blood sucking, garbage infesting, and disease propagating. They certainly do all that, but they also perform many useful jobs, such as eating decaying matter, preying on other unwelcome insects, and providing food for birds. We all love birds.

Flies are distinguished from other soaring insects by having only one pair of wings, whereas bees, wasps, and butterflies have two pairs. Flies have huge eyes and short antennae, while their four-winged cousins have small eyes and long antennae. Non-flies are often given the word “fly” as part of their name: butterfly, mayfly, and dragonfly. True flies, however, are designated by two words: house fly, crane fly, black fly, horse fly, etc. Hmmm, so is it shoofly or shoo fly pie?

Unfortunately, flies that get noticed most around here are pests, rather than their beneficial cousins who do their helpful things out of sight. So we try hard not to let their activities bias us against flies in general, but it ain’t easy.

There are three particular varieties of flies that get our vote for being the peskiest of pests: eye gnats, buffalo gnats, and deer flies. This is the time of year when they marshal their troops and attack us with a vengeance. In defense, we douse ourselves with repellant, but that is only minimally effective—the flies simply go into a holding pattern just beyond arm’s reach, wait awhile for the chemical smell to succumb to our sweat smell, and then renew their attacks. Another dose of repellant might help, but soon you begin to feel sticky and your own smell becomes chemically repulsive. We’ve sometimes been driven indoors—just to get a break from their incessant dive bombings. (It’s nice to be retired and not under pressure to have to work!)

The worst of these three pests for me is the eye gnat. It’s a tiny little thing—maybe less than one-eighth inch (about 3mm, for the metrically inclined). They don’t bite or pierce your skin (it could be worse!); they slurp up your body fluids: mucous, blood, pus, etc. It seems that the primary attraction for them is the fluid in my eye—it must appear to them as a huge enticing meal. They maneuver frantically in little circles a yard or so in front of my face and then one will abruptly dive bomb me, kamikaze style, heading directly for an eye. If I’m lucky, its aim will be off and it will bounce off an eyebrow. If its aim is true, however, it will plunge into my eye and promptly get washed under a lid. I have to run to the house and fish it out. The gnat dies in the process—not a very smart activity!

Eye gnats are incredibly persistent—particularly just before a rainstorm. It’s as if they sense that they need to get their licks in quickly, before their game gets rained out. Repellants can help a wee bit. Wrap-around glasses can also help, but when you’re working hard they tend to get all streaked with sweat. The best deterrent I’ve found is to build a little smoky fire; the smoke drives them away. I am extremely grateful for the fact that eye gnats do not follow me inside, when I retreat from their attacks. It could be worse, I tell myself.

Next time: more flies.

Mulberries Ripening

Just Say No

Way back in history—back in the 1980s—Nancy Reagan became associated with the phrase “Just say no.” In her context, she was referring to children’s recreational drug use, inferring that kids could resist peer pressure simply by refusing to partake. The campaign that followed was simplistic in its viewpoint, and ignored the reality of inner-city drug abuse and associated social issues that lead to that abuse. The “Just Say No” campaign effectively reduced the drug issue to a catch phrase that pretty much went nowhere. It became coupled with the government’s “War on Drugs”, another ongoing failure.

And yet… there is a validity and efficacy to saying no to things that are harmful to ourselves and others. All religions teach the discipline of refraining from harm—of avoiding dangerous activities. There is a lot to be said for refusing to play along, for choosing a moral and healthy lifestyle that rejects hatred, violence, and greed.

What might happen, for example, if tomorrow morning a large number of well-to-do people (not the addicts in the inner city, but the cocaine-sniffing, white collar workers in those nearby tall buildings) quit buying drugs from the cartels of Mexico and Colombia? What might happen if tomorrow morning a large number of people quit demanding so much electricity, which is mostly generated through the use of global-warming, coal-fired power plants? What happened last year when the price of gasoline soared past $4 a gallon? People trimmed their gas usage and oil futures plunged.

Rather than discipline ourselves, we consumers tend to look to the government to make laws that will check harmful activities—from personal crimes to corporate abuses. But if governments were at all effective at improving our lives in these areas, might the War on Drugs have had a few victories by now? How about the War on Poverty? The War on Global Warming? I don’t think we can count on the government; it seems unable and even unwilling (given deep-pocket lobbying) to curb these problems. Furthermore, it really is up to us—the consumers… we who buy all these harmful things.

In a recent Mother Jones magazine article, a mogul in the exploding African biofuels industry was asked by an American journalist, What could stop the devastation of his country’s old-growth forests, as they continue to get cut down for palm oil plantations? He immediately replied, “People like you, who wear cotton shirts that take 25,000 liters of water to make—you like to wear them, because they’re comfortable. People like you who drive private cars and like to fly around the world in airplanes. The consumer. That’s who determines what happens.”

That response keeps rolling around in my head. It has a ring of truth. Who’s going to stop the insanity of environmental destruction and other harmful practices? The consumer. You and me. If only we could just learn to say no.

Cobweb Weaver Spider

Ticked Off, Part 2

Last of all—and the most common mite in our neck of the woods—is the wood tick; usually called the American dog tick or the brown dog tick (who’s brown—the dog or the tick?). The American dog tick goes after both people and dogs. The brown dog tick only goes after dogs. The wood tick’s bite is the least troublesome for me. It itches for several days, but nothing like a chigger bite, and it won’t send me off to the medical system for antibiotic shots. (Now, parts west of here have to deal with the nasty Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever from this tick, but as the name implies, it’s not a big problem in our little Appalachians.)

The wood tick perches on the tip of a blade of grass or twig, patiently waiting for a mammal to wander by. Patience is truly its forte. A tick may go for years—even a decade—sitting out there, waiting for its warm-blooded meal. I can’t imagine how stoical this tick must be—or how bored. (It can’t even play tick solitaire.) This information causes me to envision a wood tick, tenaciously waiting a couple of years on its blade of grass, and then finally seeing a human coming its way. It gets so excited that it loses its grip and falls to the ground, just as the human walks ticklessly by. It slowly crawls to the blade tip once again, even hungrier, to settle in for another couple of years. The thought of the tribulations of this poor tick almost makes me want to take off my clothes and go out and lie in the woods… almost.

Virtually every bit of advice I’ve read about wood ticks tells you to gently pull an imbedded tick out of your skin, not touching it (it’s dirty!), but using rubber gloves or tweezers, and very carefully easing it out, lest its head or mouth parts break loose and fester in your hide. In over a quarter century I’ve never had a tick lose its head, either in me, my spouse, or our dogs… and we’ve pulled hundreds of ticks from us and thousands of ticks from the dogs.

With their thick doggy coats, we may miss seeing a tick for several days (sorry, I’m not going to minutely inspect every square inch of my dog’s dirty hide, several times a day). So by the time we find them, the ticks are often bloated up to several times their hungry size—looking like tiny purple zeppelins. Even after that long, the head has never come off for us.

Many people are seized by arachnophobia, but I’d rather deal with any of the many kinds of spiders we have out here, than their “mitey” cousins: ticks and chiggers. At least spiders do something useful, by preying on insects. Hmmm, I wonder if I could train them to trap ticks.

Mountain Laurel Bloom

Ticked Off, Part 1

We have three members of the arachnid class of insects around the homestead (other than many spiders), that are not really insects at all. (Insects have six legs, arachnids have eight.) All three are closely related: the wood tick, the deer tick, and the chigger. All three of them I consider pests and would be thrilled if they decided to emigrate elsewhere. All three have bitten us, causing suffering of one sort or another.

Ticks are giant mites (mighty mites). They are incredibly populous, so I guess there’s no getting rid of them—unless we and all other mammals vacate the area too. There can be millions of them inhabiting one acre of woodland—so they’ve also got us badly outnumbered. Like its distantly-related pest the mosquito, it’s usually the female tick that is the greatest bother. She feeds until she bloats herself way up, in order to get enough energy to lay her eggs.

I’ve written about deer ticks before (10/30/08). They are more than just a pest—they can be downright dangerous as purveyors of Lyme disease. They’re also problematic, because they’re so tiny. You almost can’t see one, until it’s been attached for a few days and has bloated up, engorged with your blood. If you do find a deer tick on you within a few hours of attaching itself, you can pick it off before the Lyme disease bacteria enter your bloodstream. That may sound reasonable, but it requires a minute inspection of every inch of your skin every few hours—not something that one can do alone, and not something you may want your companion to do for you.

Fortunately we are not on high deer tick alert around here, as Lyme disease is not common in our remote corner of the county. (This disease is far more prevalent in areas where a large number of people rubs shoulders with a large number of deer: in suburban communities.) So, although Lyme disease is a serious problem if you contact it, the chances for us are rather low that we’ll get bit by a deer tick and even when we do, that the bugger will be carrying the dreaded bacteria. Health officials—ultra cautious folks, when it comes to communicable diseases—would have you immediately sign on for a lengthy and costly course of antibiotics, if you even think you’ve been bitten by a deer tick. Although that may be a safe path, it’s a little extreme for us.

A mite that is even smaller than the deer tick (a mite smaller, that is) is the harvestman—better known around these parts as the chigger. These guys are about the size of a period at the end of this sentence (right here). They love to wait in ambush in weedy, grassy patches that are about a foot high. If you’re foolish enough to wander through such a patch with your pants legs hanging loose, a chigger will leap to your shoes. Then it’ll commence crawling up your leg, until it gets stopped by a tight waistband or other obstruction.

Now it’s in a nice cozy spot, so it sticks out its proboscis, buries it into a skin pore, and begins to excrete an enzyme that dissolves a few cells of your skin. The chigger slurps up its meal and lets go, dropping back to the ground, satiated. You, the host, have been ignorant of this invasion, until the next day, when the invasion site has become very itchy. It’ll remain so for several days, no matter what you do. The best palliative is to daub the spot with nail polish (I like a shocking pink color) as soon as you notice it—but the polish helps only a little.

A common misbelieve about chiggers is that they burrow into your skin and must be dug out or be suffocated with the nail polish. But the critter ain’t there; it’s long gone and you’re suffering from the assault of its spit on your immune system. It’s one of nature’s many lessons for developing human fortitude.

Next time: the wood tick.

Snowberry Clearwing Moth on Rhododendron