The Grafton Voice

Bodies, Mosquitoes, Flies, and an Old Woman

My boss went to see the “Bodies… The Exhibition” last weekend. He had complained all day Friday about having to accompany his wife to see the ‘dead Asians’ . Monday morning was a much different story. He and his wife spent more than 3 hours at the exhibit and he was awed by it. He said he brought two things from the exhibit: first, what a miraculous machine the human body is, how everything works together, and secondly, how very fragile the whole thing is – a cell gone haywire can kill the whole body.

On my way to work this morning a mosquito buzzed around the windshield. Normally I would have opened the window and shoo it out, but it was raining. I considered smashing it, but made the conscience decision not to. I started contemplating something my cousin had said once when my sisters were gossiping about a gay relative. “God,” she said, “doesn’t make mistakes. So if somebody is gay, God made him that way for a reason.” God made mosquitoes for a reason too. They are a great source of food for birds and fish for instance. Now I am not a person who is comfortable with organized religion and my use of the term “God” really means to me the powerful energy that is life giving – that which we come from and which we return to at our death.
It occurred to me that the earth is like the human body in many ways. It too is miraculous in how all the interconnected systems work together . It too is fragile – one small unit that goes haywire can cause its death. Mankind is that unit that has become a cancer to the planet.

There is a children’s song that goes, “I know an old woman who swallowed a fly; I don’t know why she swallowed a fly. Perhaps she’ll die. I know an old woman who swallowed a frog; I don’t know why she swallowed a frog. She swallowed the frog to catch the fly. I don’t know why she swallowed the fly. Perhaps she’ll die.” It goes on as she progressively swallows bigger and bigger animals to catch the previous one. I think she dies after she swallows the horse, of course. The moral of the song is to not do something against your nature or, perhaps, against Nature (with a capital N). In the last 50 years mankind has been going against Nature – polluting, deforesting, overpopulating, sucking up resources without regard to our planet or our future. So far our solutions just make more problems. Want more wheat? Plant genetically modified seeds, use chemical fertilizer, spray insecticides, then reap the harvest of nutrition-less plants, no bees, and dead soil. We need to look at our wonderful world as the living organism that it is and find solutions that benefit it as a whole, not just our cancerous little species. If we don’t— like the old lady in the song —perhaps we’ll die.