A Small Tribute to a Small Black Insect

Rushing past the kitchen sink this morning, I glanced down and saw a small black insect, about the size of a tomato seed, drifting drowned and dead through the wash water caught in a plate.  I stopped, and bending, peered closer to see what kind of insect it was.  It had short legs and antennae, a round body and seemed uniformly black.  It might have been a baby cockroach.  I don't know.  But it stopped me, at least momentarily, in my tracks. 

Just a tiny death in a world of death and destruction.  Hardly worth a second look, much less a second thought.  Yet it looked so forlorn, this tiny black insect wafting through the tiny current of splashed water.  It had existed, now it did not.  A chord was struck.

How valuable is life?  I am almost vegan yet I vacuum daddy long legs and stable flies while tenderly removing baby praying mantis, moths and wasps outside.  In playing God, I feel a slight, very slight, shadow of guilt when an insect is condemned to the swirling death of the vacuum. 

But it doesn't keep me awake at night.

Isn't that fly or spider as worthy of life as the praying mantis?  A thumbs up or thumbs down is determined purely on how I perceive the insect.  Flies are pests,  black and hairy, connoisseurs of dung and carrion and therefore doomed.  Praying mantis, with their humanlike folded arms, and despite eating flies alive starting at the head, are *cute* and therefore allowed to live.

But all creatures are different.  In flocks of galahs, all the birds look exactly the same,  yet I know from experience they are not.  Why should it be any different for smaller creatures? 

Loren Eiseley, the author, if I recall correctly, once wrote about stumbling on a curb, falling and bloodying his nose.  Rather than lamenting the accident and the pain he endured, he lamented the red blood cells, spilling on the pavement, to die in the sun. Thousands, perhaps millions of red blood cells, all alike yet all individual.  All dead.

When I sometimes cut myself and bleed I remember that.  We are not what we think we are.  We are a community of creatures, working more or less harmoniously, so that we may have the illusion that we have an identity, the identity of a smallish singular god, absolute and independent and complete. 

But we are not.  Whether we like it or not.  We are connected to everything and everything is connected to us.  Even to a small drowned insect in a not too special sink in a not too special house on a not too special Saturday morning in the country.