An idea so crazy it just might work …

The croissant diet.

butter croissant diet brad marshall fire in a bottle
I will love you and squeeze you and call you George.

No. Really!

So there’s this guy Brad Marshall … (who I believe lives in Upstate or Central New York) (already a huge plus in his favor, of course).

He’s a science guy and a foodie guy. From his bio: genetics degree from Cornell University. Culinary Certificate from The French Culinary Institute.

He got interested in how our mitochondria handle fats.

You can read all about this here on his website, Fire in a Bottle.

Here’s my probably scientifically sloppy if not outright erroneous short version: the type of fats we eat affect signaling by the mitochondria in our cells. Eat saturated fats (butter!) and the signal says “burn fat.” Eat polyunsaturated fats (vegetable oil :p) and the readout says “store fat.”

Seriously, go to this guy’s site and read. I started here, Introduction to the Croissant Diet.

(Subtitle: OR: How I eliminated my spare tire by eating croissants using the six scariest words in the english language: saturated fat, insulin resistance and free radicals. lol)

Warning: when you click you will find yourself surrounded by a ton of science and chemistry. Not being a scientist, I had to read everything 2-3x before it started to fully come alive in my brain.

But wow, it makes so much sense.

And now I have a holiday project. Taking a break from the olive and avocado oil. Hello butter and MCT oil.

Not gonna change anything else. Not going to worry about the carbs.

Full disclosure. If you ran into me in the street & looked me up & down, you’d never think “overweight.” But I have had a tendency my whole life to put on weight, esp belly fat. Keto and intermittent fasting keeps it under control. But I’m always looking for new hacks …

Plus this is going to fun. And delicious.

Who’s with me? :D

Update: 20 months later and I’m a believer.

Is it not absurder still …

“Is it not absurder still to refuse to listen to these voices from afar, because they come stammering and wandering as in a dream confusedly instead of with a trumpet’s call? Because spirits that bending to earth may undergo perhaps an earthly bewilderment and suffer unknown limitations, and half remember and half forget?”

Lady Gregory, Visions and Beliefs

My short stories & novellas just went on sale … 99 cents!

‘Tis the season!

I just lowered the prices on all of my novellas and short stories. Ebook versions on Amazon.

Here’s the titles you can now get for the low, low price of only 99 cents :D

wynter tale by Kirsten Mortensen

So this is a story that wrote itself. I started with the premise that “the real Santa” might be a kind of pagan god. Then I asked myself: what would happen if this “real” Santa turned out to be rather deliciously sexy?

But before you get the wrong idea, as one reader pointed out, Wynter Tale is more about friendship than romance. As I said, wrote itself. Also worth noting: I originally published this under the title Santa Hunk. Changed the title later to more accurately reflect the story.

Free Money, heist novella by Kirsten Mortensen

Free Money is a novella I wrote as a tribute to Elmore Leonard. It was fun to write, in part, because it weaves in a real-life crime story (and mystery) from 1980s new York. And the climax is set in a rather creepy spot in Mendon Ponds Park south of Rochester, New York. I published some pictures of the location here.

BJs on the Roof by Kirsten Mortensen

Okay, believe it or not, once upon a time — so I heard — someone really did run a prostitution ring on the roof of a building in Rochester, New York.

That said, any resemblance the characters in BJs on the Roof bear to actual people, living or dead, is purely coincidental. OTOH readers say the story makes them laugh — which was my goal!

Ribbon by Kirsten Mortensen

Ribbon is my retelling of the horror story, The Girl with the Black Velvet Ribbon.

Costume by Kirsten Mortensen

Costume is another scary story. I wrote it originally for a Halloween-themed flash fiction event.

The Vette by Kirsten Mortensen

The ‘Vette is more literary fiction. It’s loosely based on experiences I had when I was a teenager in Upstate New York.

Alpha by Kirsten Mortensen

Alpha is another story that I’d call more literary fiction. Male protag again :). The tagline: Boy met Girl a long time ago. Maybe it’s time to admit that he’s her match.

Fourteen Stores of True Love by Kirsten Mortensen number 6 Quitter

I also have a whole series of sweet love stories, like this one, Quitter. The intent was to do 14 (for Valentine’s Day, get it? hahahahaha) but I only got to 7. Maybe this year I’ll get the rest done!

Click here to visit my Amazon author page!



We were not put here to fight

Proposed:

1. The human mind-brain is exquisitely evolved to juggle and interpret inputs in order to screen them for patterns.

Do I see a face? Why yes. Yes, I do.

This happens quickly (instantaneously, as far as our conscious minds are concerned) and sub-consciously.

It’s how we survive. We must detect the tiger before it leaps. By the time the big hungry kitty kitty leaps out of the undergrowth, it’s too late.

In other words:

2. Detecting the pattern that means “tiger” amidst the tangled, chaotic inputs of brushy undergrowth is an extraordinary and extraordinarily useful capability.

3. It’s also something that is going on consciously in our mind-brains. We don’t control it.

We are continually scanning the world to detect patterns that indicate potential threats.

4. Today, the inputs we scan include vast amounts of textual information and projected images.

5. Within this chaotic mass of inputs, we “see” patterns that warn us of environmental threats, economic threats, social threats, cultural threats — any number of “bogies” that our minds assemble, from those inputs, for the purpose of forewarning us so that we can take action before the actual threat materializes and hurts or kills us.

This happens in our minds.

6. “Threats” are therefore mental forms. They are future possibilities, not 3D reality.

They are bogies.

7. Each of us brings to our experiences certain biases that influence what inputs we perceive, what inputs we reject, and how we interpret inputs. These are in part learned, and in part the consequence of our personal histories.

For example, if I grow up in a financially-stressed household, I will be biased to scan for “forms” among the inputs around me that are in the “shape” of economic threats.

If I spend all my time with people who are convinced that man-made climate change dooms the world, I will be biased to scan for patterns in the sea of inputs around me that reinforce the threat posed to me by climate change.

And the more attention I pay to those patterns, the more I notice them. It becomes self-reinforcing.

I can look at a cloud and see a cloud. I can look at a cloud and say, does it look like a face?

And immediately I start to pick out shapes in the cloud that look like a face.

Anyone can do that. It’s the way the human mind-brain works.

THEREFORE:

8. When we condemn each other for “fearing the wrong threat,” we’re ignoring the fact that we are all — ALL — subject to the same fundamentals wrt cognitive processes.

The political “left” and political “right” in the US (for example) scream at each other largely on the basis of the need to argue over bogies. “This is the real threat!” “No, THAT is the real threat!” “OMG, how can you be so stupid to think that’s a threat when clearly it’s not!” “OMG, while you waste time on that threat, this REAL threat over here is going to destroy us all!”

We scream that the “other side” lacks the data to support its threat assessments.

This battle between us ignores the fact that even in the most thoroughly studied areas of scientific or social research, there are always scraps of contradictory (or seemingly contradictory) data — which means that an engaged mind-brain can find contradictory patterns, or can fail to see patterns that appear obvious to other engaged mind-brains.

It doesn’t take more than a couple hours of reviewing the arguments of one side to confirm this.

My bogie is no less valid than yours — and vice versa.

9. The fact is, there are NOT legions of people out there who hold their political positions because they are stupid or uninformed — on either side. I don’t care what the powers-that-be claim.

There just aren’t.

10. On the contrary, the problem is more fundamental and ought to be approached with empathy and compassion: we are all afraid. We all want to be safe. We are all doing our best to identify threats and protect ourselves and the rest of the planet from those threats.

I have been blogging here lately about the collapse of insect populations. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands of articles about this trend online, now, many of which cite field research supporting it. But is the global collapse of insect populations objectively true? And is it really a harbinger of a broader environmental collapse?

I have no idea. And I’ve been on this planet long enough to have seen many, many environmental doomsday predictions fail to materialize.

This has taught me something very, very important:

Sometimes what looks like a tiger in the brush is actually just … the brush.

11. We need to stop condemning each other.

We need to stop buying into the politicians’ power games (which they play because their own fearfulness is allayed by persuading others to believe in their bogeys).

12. Reality is more pliable and subjective than we can even imagine.

13. Fear is not the answer.

14. We must learn to approach our disputes with kindness, and patience, and compassion.

15. We must learn to love each other.

16. That is why we are here. We know it.

17. That is the only thing that is true.

18. There is nothing else.

Setting a novel in perpetual summer, plus a Katydid

My current novels / novel project are, as I mentioned a couple posts ago, set in Upstate New York. It’s a fictional town called Tibbs. But, you know. Tibbs is my hometown :)

I’m still debating one element, however: time of year. Originally, I planned to set all three novels in the summertime. I like the idea of compressing Marion Flarey’s adventures into a relatively short time period. You want to subject your protag to nerve-wracking problems. Having them hit her quickly, one after another, helps to keep the pressure high.

dog in snow
Winter in the Northeast. Black and white and cold all over.

But another reason for keeping everything in the summer is that in Upstate New York, summer is the time when “nature,” in its biological form, is most intrusive and in-your-face. In the winter, nature makes herself known as well, but in terms that are tactile and visual. You feel her cold. Your visual field is smacked continually by that striking palette of blacks and whites and grays.

Summertime is different. Summertime is heat and mud and sweat and bugs and plants. You go outside and living things touch you, crawl on you. And the creatures are all having babies. Laying eggs and spinning cocoons and building nests and feeding fledglings.

It feels like that’s the world where I want my Marion Flarey to live. Green and tangled and damp. A perpetual summer, in fact …

We’ll see. There is still time for me to change my mind :)

In the meantime:

Two critter stories from this summer in Upstate New York

Both from when I was back there visiting this summer.

First: my daughter and I went for a walk around dusk, and a deer crossed the road in front of us, followed by a fawn.

The fawn saw us.

It peered at us.

It started to walk toward us.

That’s not an unusual thing. They are curious, they haven’t learned to be afraid, yet. But it was a magical moment. We stood there, watching the fawn as it stepped closer and closer, trying to figure out what sort of creature we were.

maybe a Fork-tailed Bush Katydid?  Scudderia furcata?
Green! Katydid — maybe a Fork-tailed Bush Katydid? Scudderia furcata?

Then it suddenly felt fear and ran into the brush along the road, mewling for its mother.

On another walk, we found a katydid on the pavement.

I picked it up for a photo op, and moved it off the road.

I don’t know what kind it is — there are many different kinds — maybe a Fork-tailed Bush Katydid?

If you can ID please do!

More (scarab) bracelets

mid century scarab bracelet
One of the lovely scarab bracelet pictures sent in by site visitors :)

One of my absolutely favorite sites on the interwebs is etymonline.com :)

I got hooked when I went on a James Hillman kick about a year ago. Which started when I began another dream project.

I have ridiculously good dream recall. I suppose I was born with it (although I also think it’s related to being a writer — I even published a little ebook titled Writing, Dreams, and Consciousness on the topic).

Good dream recall is one of those blessing/curse things. If I commit to recording dreams every morning, it literally consumes several hours of my time — because when you remember 3-4 dreams in great detail you can easily end up with 5000+ words’ worth of writing. Needless to say this eats into my work time. It also leaves me with a perplexing mess, because although many times I “get” at least some aspect of some of my dreams, very often their message eludes me. I am convinced (call me nuts) that every single element of any dream is there for a purpose. But oh, man. Figuring out what that purpose is?

Despite these issues, several times in my life I’ve decided to suck it up, Buttercup, and record dreams. Every morning, no exceptions. And so that’s what I did, for about six straight months last year. Write ’em down, then try to interpret. And I found Hillman, and fell hard because he is (was) a Jungian with a lovely touch when it comes to dream interpretation.

My absolutely favorite Hillman book is his Animal Presences, which deals with animals in dreams.

And yes, this post is actually about scarab bracelets.

I started collecting them after I dreamed I had purchased one.

Not that I recommend acting out your dreams in 3D reality, despite the fact that the Native American peoples, the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois), did exactly that; I’m sure they were on to something, but someday I’ll tell the story of what happened to me, one time — I was young and stupid, realized I was re-living a dream scenario and grabbed it, a bit too literally, by the pointy end of the stick. I rather made a fool of myself. Ouch. Also, this will be a story that is released only after I’m dead hahahahaha — yes I’m still embarrassed by it!

Back to Hillman: one of the cool things he does to enrich dream interpretation is consider the etymology of the words we use as we articulate / label a dream’s visuals. Sometimes looking at dreams this way can lead to apparent dead ends, in my experience, but other times it can be quite revealing — dreams often use “word play” — if you dream about a bee, it might “be” about “being,” for example. And if you push at dreams this way, you can sometimes start to feel them as a kind of language. “The symbol communes,” writes Jeffrey Kripal in The Flip. You start to feel dreams as a language the way you start to think in a foreign language once you’ve truly begun to learn it.

So that’s how I came to etymonline.com and became a regular visitor, not only when I noodle dreams but when I write, and want to dig precisely into the nuances of a particular word.

Link, linking, linked

This morning I looked up bracelet. Not hugely interesting, to be honest:

“ornamental ring or clasped chain for the wrist,” mid-15c., from Old French bracelet (14c.), diminutive of bracel, from Latin bracchiale “armlet,” from bracchium “an arm, a forearm,” from Greek brakhion “an arm” (see brachio-).

But our scarab bracelets aren’t armlets. They’re link bracelets — and things do warm up if you move to the idea of links and linking.

There is no Old English work for “link.” The word appears to be Scandanavian originally. However, there are a couple of German relatives: “Gelenk”, which means “articulation, a joint of the body; a link, ring,” and the Proto-Germanic word “khlink,” which is the source of the German word “lenken:” “to bend, turn, lead.”

I love this, because it reminds us that links are connectors but also relate to flexibility (bending) and process (leading).

So how about this — call it a thought of the day: we sometimes seem to horribly separated from everything — from each other, from Spirit, from understanding — but perhaps we are more linked than we realize. Perhaps what we perceive as separation is actually a bending. The link is there, we’re just not able to “see around the corner” to understand where, exactly, we’re being led. We just need to trust it.

In any case, my posts about scarab bracelets are linking me to people I’d otherwise never meet.

Coincidence? Or spooky symbols at a distance?

:)

And some of you are sending me emails and sharing your experiences with these funny little bracelets. And also pictures, which is a delight, and which I get to share, now — another delight :)

So on to the bracelets …

This is the underside of the bracelet pictured above :)

Starting with this picture of the back of the bracelet I shared at the top of this post. The bracelet’s owner also made a sketch of the markings on the back of one of the scarabs. Although the two leftmost markings are familiar, the other three are completely new to (see here for sketches I made of the markings on my bracelets).

Another reader sent me some pics of an interesting variation of the scarab bracelet style.

Scarab bracelet
Love this variation — I bet it looks beautiful on it’s owner’s wrist!

The cabochons on this bracelet are set on a diagonal … I’ve never seen a bracelet with this design. And I must say, if I were to come across a bracelet styled like this on ebay or etsy, I’d be very tempted to buy it — just because it is so unusual :)

mid century scarab bracelet
Although the bracelets’ stones vary in size and shape, many of the same markings crop up over and over.

She also sent me a pic of that bracelet flipped over — and here we go, those familiar “hieroglyphs” — basically identical to the marks carved on several of my bracelets.

Which once again suggests that these stones were all being sourced from a small number of producers …

The stones on this bracelet look molded rather than carved.

That said, there are bracelets out there with stones that are made of glass or other materials. Another set of pictures one of my readers sent is a bracelet with stones that appear to have been molded rather than carved.

Here’s a close-up of one of the cabochons.

The setting is really pretty though, isn’t it? And the designer made sure that you could see the “hieroglyphs” :)

Top view of the bracelet with the glass scarabs.

Here’s a top view of that same bracelet. It reminds me in design of the one I own with the small stones, which I love to wear when I’m looking for something a little lighter and more delicate.

So that’s it for now but please, if you own one of these, I’d love to see and share more photos!

Thanks for reading :)

Once Upon a Flarey Tale by Kirsten Mortensen
Her new apartment is a Tower. Will her Prince be far behind?

P.S. for convenience: if you haven’t seen them yet, my first post about these bracelets is here, and I posted about the “hieroglyphics” here.

Pssst! Do you read romance novels?

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The Othering of Nature

As some of my friends and family members know, I am writing a novel again — actually a set of three novels.

They’re first-person books narrated by my new imaginary friend, Marion Flarey. Marion is a lover of fairy tales — more — she’s a student of fairy tales (or as she comes to think of them, “flarey tales”) (get it? hahahahaha) because she begins to realize that fairy tales are not old, dead children’s stories from the past but that they continue to intrude on her life today, giving her the tools she needs to navigate her often-confusing and very 21st Century life.

Marion Flarey
Marion Flarey–my new imaginary friend. As drawn by my sweet & talented daughter :)

I’ll be blogging more about Marion and these books. I’ll be introducing Marion to you online, as she is about to start writing herself and has begun preparing a place to publish what she writes :)

But I still have a lot to do, and even though these books are in many respects already mapped out, with many words already in place, in other respects I’m still at the stage where I am understanding what they are, what they are going to be.

And once again, I’m breaking rules.

On the surface, this project is chick-litty. Marion’s voice is light and winsome, and many of her adventures take place on the chick-litty surface of her life.

But I’m aware of a sleight of hand going on as I write; no matter how I approach my books, in the end I can’t but do what “they” say that is always the right thing for writers to do.

Write what you know.

And even if “they” didn’t say it, I doubt I could help myself. More times than I can count, I’ve tried to write books that stay on the surface of things. I’ve always failed. Writing, for me, is and cannot be a purely mechanical act. Writing is an act of opening a door, and through that door something emerges whether I want it to or not. The writing becomes a conversation with something that is picking me, no matter how I tell myself I’m picking it.

For example: Dark Chemistry started out, in my mind, with a premise that I thought was intended to do no more than entertain. It was a simple and familiar recipe: a woman would be deceived into falling in love with the wrong man. The premise had a twist (the deception was achieved using a type of drug) but when I started the book, there was nothing in my plans beyond the surface mechanics: how render this recipe in a way that would hold readers’ interest, deliver a romantic pay-off as the woman discovered the deceit and realized who she really really loved.

But then I started writing, and the more I wrote, the more the book became about something else. It became an exploration that deeply interests me about the interplay of biochemistry and “feelings.” When you fall in love, what is happening, really? You think it is your heart, your being. Your soul, leading you to something good, something fated. But how much of those subjective feelings are, in fact, the result of chemicals gurgling around in your cells, inducing sensations that you interpret subjectively and then act on, blithely, obliviously, even when your actions are very much against your best interests?

mayfly
Marion Flarey’s nickname (no coincidence)? Mayfly …

In the same way, in my current project, my sweet and bewildered Marion Flarey begins by thinking the story she’s telling is about love–romantic love.

But she’s slowly realizing that it is about other things, instead.

One of them being nature.

And so, as her channeler, I’ve been thinking about nature myself.

Specifically, I’ve been thinking about how separated we are from it. How tragic it is, this separation. And how the separation is spiritual, a split that opened in the human psyche and has now, I’m afraid, become a wall.

Without our realizing it.

Several weeks ago, I was in San Diego to have breakfast with a wonderful young lady, also a writer, who I’d worked with but had never met in person. We were sitting outside at a sidewalk cafe, when I noticed an insect.

I can’t be 100% certain what the insect was, but I suspect it was a figeater beetle, Cotinis mutabilis. (Coincidentally I photographed a couple dead ones in my neighborhood and shared the photo in one of my scarab bracelet posts.)

What I can tell you is that the beetle was large and heavy, and flew the way large, heavy beetles fly: ponderously. In the northeast, if you’ve ever seen one of our enormous June bugs, you’ll know what I mean. They’re noisy and slow and heavy-looking in the air.

And sometimes they seem like they are tired. That’s how this particular beetle seemed to me, that sunny morning on the sidewalk. It seemed like he had flown long enough, that he was tiring. His flight pattern had become a circling and a sinking. He was coming in to land.

He circled near another table maybe 20 feet away.

And he landed — big mistake — on a woman’s head.

The woman freaked out.

(Would you?)

Her hair was about the same length as mine, blond and fine, like mine. And beetles have sticky legs. Not sticky like glue, but sticky because of their legs have jaggedy, spiky edges and structures that tend to catch onto things with rough surfaces, like clothing and hair. Useful if you are a clumsy flier, I suppose. When you land you don’t want to bounce. You want to stick it.

I watched all this unfold from where we sat, a little ways away. First the beetle, flying, caught my eye. I watched it circling, heard the screams start, saw it hit the woman’s head. I saw her freak. She bent over, as if cowering, as if ducking her head out of the way although by then it was too late, the beetle was on her — ohdearGod ON her! — and her companions began to grasp what had happened and to shriek “it’s in your hair, it’s in your hair!”

I stood up and walked over toward their table.

My plan was to help. To cup the beetle in my hand, take it off her head, carry it to one of the trees or planters along the sidewalk, and put it down there.

The end of the story is that I never got a chance to do that. Somehow, she shook the beetle loose or maybe one of her companions was able to knock it out of her hair.

The beetle fell down on the sidewalk.

And one of the woman’s table mates stepped on it, smashing it with a grinding motion into the concrete.

Oh, how we hate bugs. How deeply and completely we hate bugs.

And how sorry I am that we do …

This … “sequence of events” … impressed itself on me. Poignantly. And I’ve thought about it many many times in the weeks since, always with a pluck of remorse at the end as I watched the woman’s shoe grind down — me too late. Too late.

It’s only a beetle.

Yet the ending of this story hangs there for me: that pluck of sorrow, and all because I wasn’t able to lift a beetle out of a woman’s hair and move it away.

As I work on my Marion Flarey books, I’ve been reading fairy tales. A lot of fairy tales.

One of the motifs that you encounter in many of these stories is the talking animal. Very often, what happens is that a talking animal begs a human (who is often a simpleton or fool — make of that what you will, hahahaha) for its life.

The human spares the animal. Then later, the human is himself in enormous danger, and the animal reappears and saves the human.

The human’s mercy, in other words, turns out to have been the hidden key that enables a later, magical event, one that helps the human succeed in a mortally dangerous quest.

The heroes or heroines of these stories are not modern city-dwellers. They live in the country — in the forest, often, or in a city bordered by forest. But the essence of the story intrudes into our lives today. For example: how about the news stories that crop up from time to time about how some dog that a person rescued later saved that person’s life? We love those stories, because they suggest that deeper connection with animals — with Nature — that we so crave. They are magical stories.

But we no longer think of them as magical.

We’ve created a new language to describe them — a language of “behavior” and “bonding.” Mixed in with a little chance.

But what if we’ve lost something? What if replacing “magic” for something that is purely materialistic is a huge mistake?

We interact with Nature, today, only in ways that we can tightly constrain: we demand Nature be controlled, antiseptic, abstract.

Take the way that we have turned certain animals — cats and dogs, primarily — into a sort of sub-category of human. We’ve done this partly through breeding, partly through projection. As articulated in this National Geographic article, as well as many other places:

Dogs can read facial expressions, communicate jealousy, display empathy, and even watch TV, studies have shown. They’ve picked up these people-like traits during their evolution from wolves to domesticated pets, which occurred between 11,000 and 16,000 years ago, experts say.

My dog is most definitely “more human” than the coyotes that lope past the fence in our back yard!

(By the way, I’ve read somewhere — if I can remember where I’ll update w/ a citation — that to the Iroquois, dogs occupied a kind of dubious, even conflicted space between humans and wild animals — because by helping humans with tasks like hunting, they betray their animal nature. They’ve sold out. Funny, isn’t it? Dogs’ loyalty, that we so much profess to admire, is the flip side or consequence of a kind of duplicity — a conspiracy they have entered into against their own kind. As dogs have become more human, they’ve taken on something of human sinfulness. Wild, eh? Pun intended.)

And of course we talk about our dogs and cats as if they were people. They are our fur-kids. Many 21st Century humans openly and freely prefer their company to that of other humans.

kirsten mortensen's dog tessa
Nature, so carefully bred to be oh, so cute.

I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. But what I am saying is that it is part of the Othering of Nature.

For how many people, today, allow Nature into our lives in this form, only? Only after we’ve reshaped the Other, like Play-Doh pressed through a form, into something that more closely resembles us. And so it’s only this humanized version of Nature that we allow into our lives, cuddle on our couches, let sleep with us in our beds.

A beetle is another matter altogether. Pun, again, intended.

A beetle is Nature, unadulterated.

Let me pause for a moment, here. I want to be clear: I “get” the way beetles — bugs — insects — trigger horror and disgust. I’ve felt that reaction myself. Another, very vivid memory, this one from very long ago, when I was probably 9 or 10 years old. My best friend at the time happened to be a neighbor boy. And we got along very well, but in this particular instance he caught a daddy long legs and was inspired, devilishly, to chase me with it. He threatened to put it on me — and then, more horrible still — he threatened to drop it down my shirt and squish it. Awful! Awful!

ground beetle
away from me, thou alien thing

The squishability of bugs, I have considered many times in my life, accounts in part for that reaction we so often have to them. Because their squishability evokes at once their otherness (that glossy clickity exoskeleton that envelopes an unknowable goo) and their incredible vulnerability: the horrifying power we have over them, an absolute power of life and death that we can wield so cruelly and without so much as a thought. We step on the bug, grind it into the concrete. Snuff it out. And the act brings to us a sudden relief. In an instant, we have erased the the thing that triggered in us such visceral and instantaneous horror and disgust.

Aaaahhhh….

But such acts raise simultaneously a question. We seldom acknowledge the question, of course — because we prefer to leave it buried in the most hidden parts of our minds and souls — but it’s there, it has to be, it is part of the act. Because we aren’t separate from that bug we just squashed. Not really. It is us. We are it.

So in the hidden part of our mind we know that we, too, are squishable. That right there, under your rib cage, you are also full of an unknowable goo. And the hidden part of our mind knows, as well, that the power of life and death is a terrible power, one that we don’t really understand, one that is horrible to wield.

And we know that like the bug on the sidewalk, our lives can also be smushed away in a second.

And so comes that awful, secret question.

“How like that bug am I?”

How horrible is it that, no matter how much I’d like to hide it from myself, I am part of what is most horrible and disgusting about Nature — the part that is about muck and guts and decay and death?

Some of us try to extract ourselves by abstaining from meat. And just as I “get” how horrible bugs are, I also “get” veganism. I get that the flesh of the cow or the pig or the chicken is, in so many ways, too much like our own flesh. “I don’t eat anything with a face,” the vegan says. It’s a statement that makes sense. Faces remind us of something in animals that is also in us. They remind us that it’s not just humans that can feel. That perhaps an animal may beg us to spare its life, just as we would beg our own life to be spared, if we found ourselves pinned by the paws of a Beast, smelling its awful breath.

This comes, next, to an idea that is not original with me: that we lost something when we began to interact with our meat via plastic-wrapped productized muscle-meats (muscle being the least squishable bit of an animal’s body) instead of living as we did in the olden days, raising our animals on farms or hunting them in the woods, butchering them with out own hands. We don’t need, today, to see look into the face of the animal we eat. We eat a symmetrical substance trimmed of any icky fat, tendons, gristle, rinsed in antimicrobial dip to maximize its purity, placed on a piece of absorbent material to ensure there will be no icky dripping fluids, framed by a cheery rectangular tray. We don’t eat the squishy bits. We don’t eat the bits that remind us too much of our own innards, our brains, our fascia, our marrow.

But most of us stop there. We say: if you can look the animal in the face, and then eat it, that is somehow more honest than opening a package you bought at the supermarket.

I suppose that is true, as far as it goes. But there’s something else that we need to consider.

Today’s 21st Century Westernized consumer is more likely than any other generation before to have been schooled in what we sometimes call the web of life. That you can’t touch one part of Nature without affecting another part. And the implication of this, if you look at it carefully, is that we humans are enmeshed in it this web. That we are part of it.

And there’s no escaping that the web is constructed of prey and predator, of eat and be eaten.

Becoming a vegan seems like a way to extract yourself from this web. “I am not of that.” “I am above that.”

But this is false. It is also an Othering, albeit via a different mechanism — via an illusion. We trick ourselves into believing that we can turn Nature into an abstraction and then, entirely via intellect we can extract ourselves, define ourselves as Something Apart.

But we cannot. We’re still a part of it.

carrot
Time to munch on some nice fresh crunchy carrot legs.

Put another way — and I know this will sound facetious, but bear with me — in the end, how is killing a carrot more ethical than killing a cow?

We argue that there is a difference. Carrots don’t have central nervous systems. Carrots don’t have faces.

Carrots aren’t like us, therefore we don’t have to feel bad when we kill and eat them.

But in some respects, aren’t these arbitrary distinctions?

Life is life.

For me to live, something else must die.

Back in probably the early 1990s I saw an act by the comedian A. Whitney Brown, and his most memorable line from that circuit is now on the interwebs: “I am not a vegetarian because I love animals; I am a vegetarian because I hate plants.”

It was side-splittingly funny because like all honest comedy it hit a truth that we know but try not to see, because secretly it makes us feel dreadfully uncomfortable. And in this case, the truth is that we have no choice but to kill things. And the lines we draw between what we will and will not kill are in many respects extraordinarily arbitrary.

We feel uncomfortable about eating meat, because we are ethical beings that feel empathy for the sad-eyed cow being led to the slaughterhouse.

But we will squash a spider simply because if found itself inside our home.

brown widow spider
squish it – it bites

The people in fairy tales who spare the lives of animals were not adverse to killing animals for food. They couldn’t afford to be. They had set out on long, lonely, physically grueling quests. The bread and jug of water they took when they started has long been depleted. So even in the stories where the heroes spare one animal, they often go on to kill and eat another.

They have to eat.

The difference is that one animal speaks.

Does that mean the one animal was more human than the other?

I think not.

I think that all animals speak. But it’s not human speech.

It’s got nothing to do with an animal becoming more human.

On the contrary. It has something to do with us, the humans, becoming something else — something other than what we usually are, in our ego-focused daily lives. It requires us to shift away from our habitual mode, this awareness that our egos claim is supreme but is more like a chip of wood bobbing along on the surface of a dark frothing current of reaction and counter-reaction and counter-counter-reaction. It requires that we find a mode that approaches a different kind of of awareness or understanding — one where our minds somehow reach out and meet Nature on Nature’s terms.

If you try this, and stay with it, show some patience with it, you can realize first-hand what I’m talking about.

Ask an animal a question and wait for an answer.

Not with your voice. Ask with your mind.

It can be any animal — it can be a pet or a wild animal you see outside your window or in the park or in the forest.

I remember the first time I saw a wood thrush. I heard it, often, in a stand of woods behind a house where I once lived. The song of a wood thrush is unmistakable, an ethereal piping. And so one day I walked into the woods where this wood thrush sang, and in my mind, I asked a question.

“May I see you?”

And a moment later, the bird answered. Not with words, but by materializing out of the thick leafiness of the forest and landing on a branch right above me, where it perched.

It peered down at me.

It was no more than five or six feet away. I could see the bird so clearly: the robin-like shape of its body, its soft breast buff with dark spots, and its eye, large, gentle, brown. Looking at me–looking into my eyes with its own.

Curiously.

And then it flew off.

Of course, you could call the entire thing a coincidence.

But I believe the bird felt my question and responded to it.

And I have replicated this experience multiple times. Not this exact experience — not with the wood thrush, not with the same question.

But with other questions. Or with internal motions, motions of the soul that aren’t even questions exactly, at least not questions that can be put into words, but more like questions about what is.

great horned owl

Who are you?

What are you?

The books I’m writing now, my Marion Flarey books, are once again set in my beloved Upstate New York. The rural bits where I grew up.

And as these books begin to take shape, I’m realizing how much I need to write about nature.

But not the nature you see on television, or learn about in a class on environmentalism, or even see when you go on a hike.

It’s a nature that is part of you–that is part of all of us.

And it’s dying. Quite possibly.

Which means that we are dying.

And many of us are aware of this, and are responding with fear and fury.

But we need a different sort of response, as well. One that is not political, because it’s ultimately not a political crisis, but a crisis of the soul.

There are bugs in your room, right now. They have blundered into your home.

They talk.

Do you hate them?

Why?