SELF-AWARENESS
Is it Buddhist to Swat Bugs?
I Am Nectar to Mosquitoes
Here in California, we are simmering, AGAIN. The horrid heat isn’t the shocker. Well, it is but there’s more. Because these are the days I haul out my go-to heat-beating, short and floaty green sundress. A breezy fan in a dress, but as for the rest of me, whose is all the wan, cave-dweller skin?
When I first started swimming as an adult, a woman at the next locker declared “You’re white as a Hungarian.” She’d once been on their Olympic team, so knew from glowworms in the pool.
Correction: I’m more of a pale tint of olive. Californios run to tan, but since sunshine boils me directly to a tomato, I keep covered up. The pallidness unveiled by my floaty dress is the regular issue anemic skin I inherited from far-north ancestors. What I do mind are the sprays of white spots everywhere and how they are playing connect-the-dots.
They are the scar signatures of the biting legions, the hungry clouds of mosquitos that have preyed on me since I was a kid. Because mosquitos love my hot, sweet blood.
It’s hardly mutual. As a standard mammal, I wish to hold onto my vital fluid rather than become an involuntary transfusion. But I then run headlong, or is that body long, against an unforgiving, strictly no-kill policy.
Nearly always since I can remember, well before mindfulness days, it has pained me to take life or cause injury if I can help it, and species format doesn’t come into it. I am a shuttle service for bathroom spiders. My heart pangs for squashed snails on the sidewalk. No need to mention kittens and puppies. So being around mosquitos means a lot of negotiating.
“Get AWAY!” “Cut that out!” I yell at them when they start buzzing me with their love song, then tickle me with a touchdown. Since I am miles of four-star raw buffet. Gleefully, they scream to swill more courses.
I’m not normally a yeller, but figure it’s okay when you’re going buggy.
“No! Stop it! I’m not dinner!” I reason.
Despite every noble non-violent intention, after a few minutes of this, I’m surging with murderousness. I try to distract myself by admiring how delicate they are, the way their proboscis curves so ergonomically in its gentle slurping arc.
In their spindly elegance, aren’t they every bit in the grand ballet of Mother Nature? Who I am to criticize Her, just because I don’t see the beauty of bloodsucking? Okay, she also made plagues and bad breath. But judgy, judgy!
They never listen. Instead, they stab you with that sharp little pinch, letting loose the roar of the biting fires. Too soon you’re hopping with the twitch of the hot weather itch.
Alright, at this point I do slap them. It happens. Because dang it all, our species are at war. If a scrap of gentler, kinder me manages to creep in, a kind of wave-slap is the best I can do. It seems fair to give them a little chance.
Then again, human hands are for slapping! A gotcha of the digits! It’s deeply primal, that joy of crushing a cruising mosquito to bug smash. Try to picture someone who just pulverized one and isn’t smiling. All in the ancient and time-honored people-bug relationship, nothing invented by me.
So are they sentient beings or slap-magnets? When I’m in eco-coexistence mode, before the welts pop out, I sometimes shrink myself down to imagine this giant hand hammer coming at me with lethal force, when all I want is a refreshing drink! When the fountain of juicy blood-nectar is begging to be supped, what is my handy straw for anyway?
What terrible karma to be a bug.
Or maybe I’ve been had again, like with the spiders who don’t always play nice. Because all that soprano shrieking could be the sound of mosquitos laughing, their blood-packed sides splitting with yeah haha we got you before you got us! Think you’re so big and mighty? Who just aced the big-gulp iron smoothie?
Meanwhile, my bite spots/polka dots keep spreading and perhaps one day soon will join together, making me even more palely beckoning and easier to find on a blistering, scratchy evening.
