Kwan Yen--our
little goddess of compassion. We found
her in a local nursery. She is slim
and stands
only four feet tall but weighs close to two hundred pounds from molded
concrete.
A concrete
goddess…how’s that for an oxymoron? She
is coiffed and clothed as a Chinese girl should be and would
even warrant the adjective demure but for her small right foot—all five perfect
little toes--boldly presenting themselves from beneath her floor-length skirt. Is
it because she is going somewhere?
Did the artist capture her in the midst of a small but sure step or
is this a subtle offering, a promise of a different kind of divine delight? I guess we will never know. Her lips are sealed.
When we stood
her against the small arched wooden bridge in our front yard we thought it the
perfect place for her energy to emanate and envelop our entire acre. And for a number of months it was so. This goddess
of compassion made compassion reign. Flowers
bloomed, fruit appeared, birds and butterflies filled the air.
But then, the plague arrived, the plague of oak moth
caterpillars gnawing their way through our luxuriant oak canopy, rappelling
down from the heights like an endless gang of warriors. They covered our walls and walkways with their skinny
black and green bodies and copper helmets and their poop—which scientists have
given the dubious name frass. Frass descended
from the leaves above blanketing everything, its smell spoiling every inhale. A biologist friend told us this is a once
every six or seven year phenomenon. If you don't do commercial spraying (expensive!) right at the first sign, it's a waste. The
oak trees, though utterly stripped, will rebound. The caterpillars will become
pupae and the pupae moths but once hatched they will move on and even if they
don’t their children, the next generation of caterpillars, will die at the
hands of a tiny parasite that takes but a single generation to catch up to its
prey. Isn’t nature wonderful?
The balance! Ah!! It only takes one year for the parasites to
overtake the marauding worms and set things right. So our friend, counseled, since we woke up to the invasion too late for commercial spraying, we should “become
one with the caterpillars.” In other words, let Kwan Yen’s spell of mercy
abide.
Alas, we could not. The smell of the frass was too “in your
nose”, the sight of the caterpillars too icky.
Yes, so icky that a couple in their sixties had to reach back to the
childhood word icky to describe them. And the final straw floated down when
they covered Kwan Yen’s tiny toes, nose, eyes and ears.
Now you might say they were showing her affection. One of the stories about her tells us that
animals had an affinity for her, even helped her do burdensome chores in a
monastery hundreds of years before St Francis spoke to birds in Europe.
You might say they were showing her respect.
You might say the caterpillars were worshipping at her feet,
on her feet, limbs, hands, face and hair.
And you might say they were a dastardly pestilence
that needed to be mercilessly wiped
from the earth.
Believe me, we tried to be good students of our goddess, to
be one with one with the worm, one with the frass, one with the pupae. Unfortunately, like
all humans except those who attain godly status we were weakened by our
anger. We attacked those worms and their
little sleeping pods with environmentally friendly death sprays, wire brushes,
power washers, blowers and outdoor vacuums strong enough to uproot an oak. We sucked, squashed, smashed, blew and
blasted them off our walls and deck. As
each day passed we embraced our murderous mission with greater zeal, driven to
the precipice of madness by the pungency of frass.
But finally, it was over.
Every last worm was either dead or had spun its tiny sanctuary of transformation
in the branches beyond our reach. Then
and only then did we approach our freshly washed goddess to ask for compassion when
we had given none, mercy when we had been merciless. For the legend tells us she refused to go
into heaven because she heard the cries of the world and wanted to return to
assuage them. Weren’t those cries now
coming from us? Yes, but our cries,
were not at first for forgiveness, because we did not seek it. We did not feel guilty, initially. After all, if we had not done the
killing, wouldn’t the parasites? How
would that have been preferable?
We felt ambivalent and confused. We were both sorry and not sorry. That's what we cried to have lifted from us--ambivalence and confusion. We cried over our low tolerance for frass falling from
the sky, sharp smells, gangs of insects that, unlike the migrations of monarch
butterflies, had for us no redeeming qualities whatsoever; a low tolerance in
general for beings—human and otherwise—that were different, and neither
beautiful nor useful in their differentness. We cried out not only for mercy
and understanding. We cried out for the the
spell of being human to be re-cast so that compassion would live in our hearts,
not just flop on the couch for a week from time to time. We cried out for
the strength to trust more, allow more,
witness more. We cried out for our
capacity for anger to be reshaped into a greater capacity for love that we might be one with nature and one with mankind and our wars against both might finally come to an end.
Only weeks after the moths left,
the canopy was full and lush again, in fact, more luxuriant than it had been
before the caterpillars arrived. The
irony weighed heavily upon us. Heavily. We stood in the shade surveying our little piece
of reborn heaven, trying not to notice that the ground was littered with tiny
graves.
C 2014 Bob Kamm
