Flight! Can you imagine being able to fly after being buried under thousands of pounds of earth and pressure for 17 years?!?!
She spent 17 years buried deep in the dark safety of the earth doing
nothing but eating and growing among a vast network of roots and
tunnels in a world totally unknowable to humans.
Then, shit got real, as they say. Something told her to go towards
the light. A complete unknown and utterly foreign world waited for
her.
She dug and she climbed (to where she did not know) but her body
compelled her to do so and would allow for nothing else, so she
carried on and on.
I cannot imagine what it must have felt to see her first glimpse of
sunshine after 17 years of life in total darkness. It is an idea so
foreign and so remarkable it boggles my mind-as I’m sure it did
hers.
What her last days were, I would like to imagine, involved utter
hedonism for which these remarkable beings are famous.
Lots of song and dance and sex and flight.
Flight! Can you imagine being able to fly after being buried under
thousands of pounds of earth and pressure for 17 years?!?!
There are no adequate words to explain the remarkable life cycle of
these creatures.
Her final curtain call, after the last act of ensuring the survival
of her species, was serving as nourishment for thousands of tiny
ants which came pouring forth from her body as I moved her. They
returned her to the soil and the earth, through their own endless
networks of tunnels in the darkness. She returned home.
I feel terrible for the humans who cannot understand or see the
miracle of not just these insects but the entire, vast, glorious web
of nature and its biology, its morphology. Those in concrete
jungles, either by force or their own design. They miss all this.
The miracle. One out of an infinity.