Dive down

The Goddess Oak always has something disconcerting to say. This time it was, "You really need to dive more deeply into death stuff." I thanked her and walked on to Kairos, who is a somewhat cheerier person.

As I sat there, things were dropping from the branches. I thought they were bits of leaf or bits of wood, but one that fell close to me was a caterpillar. What are caterpillars doing falling from trees? Is that part of their grand plan? I think it is the caterpillar of the silver Y moth, which is supposed to be living in low herbaceous plants, not oak canopies.

Anyway, as I sat there, thinking of death, I heard crows or rooks mobbing a kite or a buzzard. I thought of the corvids' courage. Kairos said, "Animals do not not want to die; they want to live. But they also do not want their children to die. Trees do not think of dying. Or really of living. We just do. But the distinction between wanting to live and not wanting to die is important. Your kind are fixated on not wanting to die and so you do not properly live."

That was helpful.

Then I sat there thinking about dung beetles, and what I sensed was this: while in my mind the image of Sisyphus comes to the fore when I think of dung beetles rolling their balls of dung - Sisyphus rolling the rock up the slope and it falling down - and Albert Camus "We must think of Sisyphus happy." - the dung beetles say of course it's not like that. And it ties into animals not wanting their children to die: I do this, says the beetle, not as a pointless punishment, but as precious parenting.

As it happens, one family of dung beetles are named after Sisyphus.