Content warning: brief mentions of suicide.
On the windowsill in my shower, ladybugs dive off the edge with a death wish.
February, and it’s too cold for the hard-backed beetles to survive outside, so they’ve come indoors. They tend to cluster around the periphery of windows, where they’ve found their way in—they are in my office; in Ryan’s office; in the bathroom. When I draw aside the shower curtain and step in, still bleary-eyed, warm water raining down around my shoulders, I see them clinging to the tile sill that slopes down into the tub. There’s nothing for the ladybugs to eat in here, but they persist, crawling to the lip of the windowsill, then launching themselves over its edge. I cannot help but think of them as suicides. When they dive, I kneel down and pick them up with my hands, placing them back on the sill.
*
I did this multiple times, every time I showered, for weeks. Scooping the ladybugs out of harm’s way, away from the water and the swirl of the drain. Then it grew warm, and then it was March, and now the lady beetles have begun to disperse and return to the outdoors.
*
Harmonia axyridis, also known as the harlequin lady beetle, the Asian lady beetle, the pumpkin beetle, or the winter beetle, as it’s called around here, is a species of ladybug in the family Coccinellidae. Harmonia looks like most other kinds of ladybugs, or coccinellids—domed and hard-backed, with an orangey-red shell that can have from two to nineteen spots. Harmonia is also native to Asia—hence the name “Asian lady beetle”—and was introduced to the North America for the purposes of agriculture, imported to eat aphids and scales. The species is bigger and hardier than native lady beetles, as well as a voracious eater, and as a result, it’s come to be the most prevalent species of coccinellid in the states; it’s also categorized as an invasive species.
Look up the Asian lady beetle online and you’ll immediately encounter a strange kind of nativist language. Unlike the native lady beetle—a real ladybug, some will argue—Harmonia is orange, not red; is big and aggressive, not small and docile; and bites. Harmonia is a lookalike interloper; a foreign, scary bug; it’s invasive, it’s out of control, and it’s definitely not the cute, beloved red ladybug that’s supposed to bring luck.
It’s funny to me that the Asian lady beetle is said to have been established in the Northwest in 1991. A year before I was born. We’re nearly the same age.
*
About a week after I wrote my most recent letter here, I assigned the Annie Dillard essay, “The Death of a Moth,” to my workshop. At the time, I wasn’t really thinking about its content or its message; I’d just happened to encounter a companion essay by Dillard in which she explains how she wrote and revised it. I had set aside a class session to talk about revision strategies, and I wanted to have something in hand to discuss. Four days later, Aaron Bushnell self-immolated in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington DC in protest of the genocide of the Palestinian people.
In the essay, Dillard describes seeing a moth, caught in the wax of her candle, catch flame.
The wax rose in the moth’s body from her soaking abdomen to her thorax to the jagged hole where her head should be, and widened into flame, a saffron-yellow flame that robed her to the ground like any immolating monk. That candle had two wicks, two flames of identical height, side by side.
In this moment, Dillard is camping, and she is reading Rimbaud, hoping to recover a love for writing; the flaming body of the moth gives light—is light—that illuminates the source of her inspiration, her devotion to a single act. Later, she writes:
How many of you, I asked the people in my class, which of you want to give your lives and be writers? I was trembling from coffee, or cigarettes, or the closeness of faces all around me. (Is this what we live for? I thought; is this the only final beauty: the color of skin in any light, and living, human eyes?) All hands rose to the question. (You, Nick? Will you? Margaret? Randy? Why do I want them to mean it?) And then I tried to tell them what the choice must mean: you can’t be anything else.
I knew I needed to talk about what happened—what Bushnell had done, and what it meant—but I didn’t know how to go about it, could only bring it into the room. A student responded more eloquently than I ever could, drawing a parallel between Bushnell’s self-immolation and the devotion that Dillard asks of the aspiring writers in her class. Both are giving your life to something.
I’ve spent a long time thinking about Aaron, about what his act of martyrdom means—for it is martyrdom, and it is a terrible thing to know we live in a world where a young man feels that dying in protest is a necessary act. I have been trying to comprehend him and what he must have felt. Charlotte Shane wrote beautifully of attending his memorial in D.C.
How do we devote our lives?
When we were traveling in Vietnam, Ryan and I went to a temple where, preserved as a memorial, is the car in which Thích Quảng Đức traveled to his self-immolation, protesting the persecution of Buddhists by the Diệm regime. It was moving to see how clean and cared for the car was; it was strange to be surrounded by tourists, as we were, reading the plaques, taking pictures. Thiên Mụ is a functioning temple. Monks still walk the grounds in brown robes. Near the back of the temple grounds, in a rectangular pool, lotus flowers bloom from the mud.
How do we care for each other?
*
At the end of February—right after teaching that class, actually—I fell apart. I’m writing this to tell you, and also because I can’t really remember it. Writing helps. For weeks I’d been feeling like I was underwater, moving through life without real pleasure or discernment. Every sensation felt a hairsbreadth from weeping. I was traveling a lot and working too much, and then there was everything. Which is still everything. There were times when I was my version of suicidal, which is when I tell myself that everything would probably be fine if I died. But I didn’t. Instead, I got sick and spent two days in bed, crying mostly. When I emerged I felt lifted, able to feel the temperature of the air on my face.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about death, partly because it’s come up in dharma talks and discussions, and partly because when I’m not depressed, I’m almost paralyzingly frightened of it. I’m afraid of my own death, but I’m more afraid of the deaths of the people I love. But they will die; we all will. That is our nature.
And still. I don’t let the Harmonia die, when it stumbles off the edge of the windowsill and plunges toward the water. I don’t let the ladybirds get crushed between casement and window. Even though they are invasive. They have come into my home, looking for shelter.
Last week a friend visited and stayed for a couple of days. She opened the window and a cloud of lady beetles flew in—they clung to the glass and to the curtains. When she came to get me, worried about how many there were in the house, I said it was okay. I got a glass jar, and a duster—the soft, flexible microfiber kind that’s attached to a piece of plastic—and I held the jar up to the windows, gently brushing the ladybugs in. When they were all in the jar, and beginning to crawl around, tickling my palm and the sides of my hands, I carried it to the porch, opened the door, and let them outside.
Till soon,
LP
PS: To account for my lack of a second paid post here lately—I’ve been unexpectedly busy this semester and it’s been tough to write—I’ve put collecting monthly paid subscriptions on hold. I’ll turn them back on again when I’m able to write here more regularly, but in the meantime, if you’d like to cancel or adjust your subscription, feel free to do so—it’s all through Stripe. And if you have any questions, just write and let me know. Thank you for continuing to support this project!
PPS: Here are some actions you can take to support those in Palestine, per my last letter, which still apply, and with some updates. You can donate to the International Federation for Journalists’ safety fund (write “PJS-2023” in the comment box) to help purchase safety supplies for journalists in Palestine. You can send e-sims to Gazans here (instructions included on the website). You can write to your electeds using democracy.io, and if you can, call and fax them too—when you write to members of Congress in particular, ask them to reinstate funding to UNRWA, which provides aid to Palestinian refugees. You can read reporting from places like Al-Jazeera and Democracy Now. You can participate in a strategic consumer boycott as part of the BDS movement, and if you work at a cultural institution, you can sign onto PACBI.
If you don't know her work, maybe be try Margaret Renkl. She writes a Monday column for The New York Times and has written a number of books that focus on her natural and wild garden. I went to Vietnam once...