Not Very Zen

Warning: Do not read if you have issues with insect deaths at the hands of bullying humans.

Asian Japanese Lady Beetle suvivors

 Also, apologies in advance if this post offends any religion, be it mine or yours, I'm really sorry. It is all intended in good fun.

The story goes* that I graduated high school a semester early, but the University of Illinois didn't accept early admissions. My parents made higher education sound more appealing than a K-Mart job, so taking six introductory liberal arts classes at Roosevelt University managed to kill the time.

I took public transportation downtown.

One day a young man with frizzy sideburns and bluejeans sat down next to me on the train. Within seconds he started to mumble, or maybe chant. He did this for awhile, then seemingly satisfied, stopped. As he fished inside his backpack for a book, I asked what that was about.  He told me that he learned a mantra from a Zen master, and chanting the mantra made him calm and happy.

"Would you like to have my mantra, too?" he asked.

"Sure!"

It isn't every day that someone gives you a mantra, so I wrote it down. We didn't have Google to translate in those days, so the experience had an element of danger and excitement. Now, whenever I pass the mantra on as a cognitive behavioral self-relaxation tool, I sense this excitement with others, too, but add a warning: Before taking on this mantra, check out the meaning. Humming most things is relaxing, too.

But here you go. It is freeware.

nam-myoho-renge-kyo 

I repeated those words until they burned their way into my memory, but found the process, and the mantra, boring. So that was the end of that.  Suggesting mindfulness training, on well-scrutinized occasions, is as close as it gets to Buddhism in my life.

Gabriel Costans and Zen Master Tova

Except that once in awhile I get a random book in the mail from someone like Gabriel Costans who loves it. Gabriel requested a blog review in the most charming fashion, a promise that my karma will improve, certainly, if I open the book, and who doesn't need good karma?

The title, Zen Master Tova Tarantino Toshiba: the Illustrious and Delusional Abbess of Satire, indicates that Mr. Costans is associating with too many people of the tribe. That, or I don't know much about Buddhist names. But he is a psychologist and sincere, so there you go.

Zen Master Tova Tarantino Toshiba is an abbess and an ageless satirist, so it is likely the book is entirely satire, but because I  didn't finish it, I can't say quite yet. But many a true word is said in jest, and not understanding much about Buddhism, the pages, to me, are a mystery wrapped in an enigma, which is a part of the book's charm. The other part is that any book with short chapters, some as short as only a paragraph or a single page, at most two or three, is very appealing to those of us who are asleep before the head hits the pillow. 

To broaden our perspective on Buddhism, here is a snippet about Master Tova (Mistress Toshiba) and her reaction to fishermen using worms for bait. 

Let the Worms Go

There was no difference between one life and another to Mistress Toshiba. She respected all with equanimity, love, and tender care. . . . her compassion for worms . . . legendary. 

The nuns were were walking with their Mistress, on their way to market to sell their organic vegetables, when they passed some fishermen who were taking worms out of a bucket, putting them on their hooks, and casting them into the river.

To make a short story shorter, the Mistress knocks over the bucket, setting the worms free, and proceeds to convince the angry fishermen that they are on the wrong track, killing worms. She offers up her organic vegetables as a substitute for fish. We're not sure how this will effect her spiritual ecosystem, but are lead to believe that the cosmos is much better if worms can just be worms.

The story makes me feel guilty. Because here I am, powerless when insects cross my path. I smash them.

Note the astronomical difference between my reaction to a turtle a few weeks ago, and yesterday's response, now old news, to the Asian Lady Beetle.

Riding my bike along the river, I happened to look down to where the sidewalk meets the grass. There lurked a huge turtle determining whether or not to cross. Huge turtles are not something we see in Chicago, not unless we visit the zoo. We see raccoons and skunks, deer, coyotes and the cursed geese, but not turtles. It made me happy, seeing something new, but I didn't stop to take a picture, couldn't risk being late for work.

Fast forward to yesterday afternoon, after I attempted genocide on Asian Lady Beetles, FD, vacuum hose in hand, gently chastising me: "For someone who professes to like nature, you had no trouble attempting to eliminate an entire species. The beetles would have died on their own in a day or two."

And what if they had not?

Asian Lady Beetles, you may know, are not your everyday Ladybugs, not the kind that flitted by the light with ladylike grace in your mother's kitchen. The ladybugs of yore didn't swarm. You were lucky to see one or two of them, whereas the Japanese Asian Lady Beetles swarm and bite.  And they arrive in droves, hundreds of thousands of them, clinging to windows, walls, homes, babies, to the skirts and bodies of those of us in the Midwest. Certainly Chicago.  

The crisp fall weather spiked to the high sixties, and when I reached my office I couldn't wait to open all of the windows to let in some air.  The screens, unfortunately, harbored hundreds, seemingly thousands of these beetles. N= 9000.  That's N = 9000 against 1.

Adult and Childhood History enhances any narrative:

I never really liked bugs, but had no particular gripe against them, not until yellow jackets turned on the children in the neighborhood. Upon the advice of the entomology department at the University of Illinois, on one dark, cold October night, FD and I dressed in coats and ski masks and, poured liquid diazanon on the beehive buried in a hole on our front yard parkway. Running back to the house in fear and triumph, we could hear them scream.


Fast forward for a moment.

So. . . able to face bees, I'm cool, not about to become unglued by a few beetles. Yet every ounce of aggression stored in my moderately-sized female body shocked me into action when I saw. Mere fly swatters would not do. As the beetles taunted and laughed I reached for Raid, strong stuff, no Googling for solutions to this problem necessary.

The bug spray, under the sink where it should be, is half-full, as expected.

I crack open the window incrementally, begin to systematically exterminate twenty to thirty beetles at a time, all in a vertical up and down linear fashion. The bugs go flying across the yard with the full force of the spray, but some merely fall on the window sill.

All across the breadth of the sill poison drips, bugs drop.  They don't even try to fight back.  It is poignant, like a good war movie. I close the window and proceed to the next, feeling queasy but justified, this despite Mistress Tarentino's warning about my soul.  A few ladies fall to the carpeted office floor and I let them be, unwilling to sully my broom.

Not exactly sure what to do with the corpses, I go shopping.

FD sees an after-the-fact video (dead bugs that appear as popcorn kernels) and drops by with a screen mending kit. He asks for a vacuum cleaner.

He does a very nice job.  I thank him for fixing the screen and tell him that I feel very guilty about this, almost as bad as when we used the diazanon on the bees. It made me flash back to an even earlier childhood memory, a small child in pajamas, waking up in the middle of the night to the buzz of mosquitoes in her ear, flipping on the overhead to spot one clinging to the pink tinted bedroom wall. I swap him dead with a Highlights for Children.

Perhaps a support group.

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*I might have told over stories in this post before. Eight years blogging, it happens.

The Annual Wildlife Post—Why Bugs Freak Us Out

At dusk the drone of the cicadas is deafening. For a species that theoretically only spawns every three to five years, this annual event puzzles Chicagoans. We're confused because we hide from the elements most of the year so any summertime visual/auditory arousal throws us off.

My 8-year old grandson takes the cicada fertility boon as an opportunity to collect molted shells, the exoskeletons. He’s delighted with this process. To add to the wonderment of it all, his aunt bought him a plastic bug farm for live insects. I told her that one day, when she has grandchildren, I'll try to return the favor.



But even an 8-year old can’t take the sight of maggots eating through the head of a dead bird. Master Scientist comes running to inform me, after my Saturday nap:

"Bubbie, you’re not going to believe this! On the deck, in a flower pot, is a dead bird! A very large, dead, black bird! And his head is only a skeleton! The worms are eating him. You have to see this!"

I’m sick at the thought, pass on the demonstration, and he totally understands. The culprit is West Nile Virus, or bird flu, some such plague. Black crows are dropping from the sky. You see them in the parks, quite dead, if you look carefully. This is an opportunity for my daughter, a good Jewish mother, to teach her son, “Now you have to be SURE to wash your hands when you touch bugs. You could catch the sickness, too.”

This is probably where it begins, I'm thinking, the female aversion to bugs, for it does seem to be associated with women, the EEEK, thing. Generations of prejudice against things that crawl, for no one likes anything crawling on the skin, and the fear of disease. Perhaps there is also a fear of the unknown, a fear of invasion. They are small. They're fast. They hide. Who can keep up with them?

But honest. They’re so small, bugs. We can kill them fairly easily. Seven in one blow, if necessary. And RAID is amazing, has subdued many a crawling or flying six-legged monster.

A person can't let them get the psychological upper hand. You just can't. Even in quantity, they're still just bugs. I can say this because aside from a few spiders and a few ants, resident centipedes and water bugs, my house is bug free. If there were other, strange, territorial, hard-to-kill bugs, I'd probably move.

We're supposed to be tolerant, I guess, and loving. But last week we were playing a little tennis near a city garden and a bee stung my hand as I reached for a lost ball. It was a little bee, an aggressive bugger, and I got angry because I had been trying to teach the kids what I learned from the book, The Secret Life of Bees (fabulous, Sue Monk Kidd, that if you love them, bees, they won’t hurt you. Send them love.

Rubbish. Do not believe this.

Once I had a friend who told me a bug story. Her mother ridiculed her for being afraid of bugs, and she didn't even have a fear of bugs, not in the plural. It was one particular bug that threw her off her game, a big indestructible thing.

None of us like the indestructible ones.

I have a fond memory of waking up to the sound of a mosquito buzzing in my ear, me trying to rouse my parents from their sleep. My mother groggily inspires me, "You can do this, I know you can. Turn on the light, track him down, and kill him." She didn't like mice, particularly, but there wasn't a bug she couldn't dispose of with alacrity. Once I mastered mosquito detection, it was a short step to swatting and murdering the bloody things.

So why the bug phobia, you asked, didn't you? I think that the EEEK! thing is a combination of what we've already said, they're small, they could go anywhere, but we should add the functionality of the behavior, see it, sometimes, as a coy female reaction that begs male attention. Bring out the club, caveman. We have roaches.

This vulnerability is modeled by a woman's mother, a woman who assigned the job, killing house bugs, to a man. Not all that different than Do the lawn, dear, it's grown to my knees. It is endearing when they come to the rescue, and gives the fellow something easy to do, something less taxing than the lawn. Some swat with a bare hand.

My daughter didn't see a bug-killing role division, for if you remember, bugs didn't blow my own mother away. So theoretically, knowing how transgenerational these things can be, my daughter shouldn't have shrieked this morning when she opened her laptop to find an ant. She shrieked once, then she shrieked again when she saw another. I brought out the RAID, but she blamed herself for letting the kids eat terrible sticky things while playing Club Penguin (the Facebook entry drug).

The shriek, we concurred, was associated with the thought of insects devouring the inside of her Mac. A fairly good reason to fear them.

Now, if I hear a drone from inside that thing at dusk? Something's going to have to give.


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