A Bug’s Life
If I was a bug, I would live near the ground. Pretty self explanatory, seeing as how small bugs in comparison to every other living creature. Even then, from a ground-level perspective, we are more alike than different—combatting hunger, competition and the dirt path veiled by kicked up dust, unbeknown to each living creature about what lies just up ahead.
Sometimes I look up the directions to two places on what feel like opposite sides of the world and look at how long it would take to get there by foot. I wonder about the journey and all that it might encompass as I take off with only what I can carry. I make my way in the world close to the ground, like a bug, but am given a choice of whether or not to hurt what is in my way. Ruin and destruction are inevitable in a world where survival dictates who lives and, as consequence, who dies.
Bugs scour and scavenge with fierce make-way, claiming biodiversity their slave and shaping it into eons of future spawn. Making their way through the world is a process of leaving home to know where it is; their beginning, middle and end all belong to the dirt high-class animals cannot seem to get away from. The ground of our Earth and the foundation of our identities is spun by the nature living among and within us.
In the beginning, there was dirt. Multitudinous makings of biodiverse metropolis having fed the Earth tenfold since appearing out of the ocean. The ground that they walk on and replenish throughout by measure of breath after breath is where they will also be buried. They, bugs, do not take lightly to external forces that may come in and divulge their evolution. Science is but something that constructs one’s reality into subjects, facets that do not tire whether we have been stepped on, scraped off or sold off for the consumption of others. To ‘be’ is to be used—to take what has been made and honor its contribution in widening our dirt paths.
We use the dirt to catch us when we fall, to absorb the blood, sweat, and tears our bodies can no longer hold, making us no different from the bugs who dig their way out of the rubble they create, only to hit rock bottom once more.
The path we find ourselves stuck on is the same one where bugs lay their bodies down and wait—for a familiar signal, or simply to feel that in this vast world, they are not alone. Knowing that the ground is always close, whether in pure moments of tip toe or by birds-eye-view below, it is a constant reminder that they will eventually and once again be one with what they know to be true.
Their grit shines in each speckle of dirt, gleaming in recognition by the ever-watching sun and moon—the work of a species transformed, but not forgotten.
