First Things

Sometimes ordinary times require you to step beyond long held prejudices.  Since childhood, I’ve had an aversion to bugs with, let’s say, insufficient cuteness factors.  This insufficiency affects most bugs to my mind, but then, beauty is always in the eye of the beholder.  When I entered the bathroom early my first morning in Yogyakarta, a large black beetle quickly scurried for cover behind the wastebasket.  I took note of his (yes, it was a “he”) location so that I could avoid him when I came back to shower.

 Later I stepped under the shower as far from the wastebasket as possible (the bathroom is one unseparated space).  But as my left foot came down, I felt a squish.  Could I bear to look down?  I did; it was.  Thankfully the stream of water moving toward the drain began to carry the beetle away.  It stopped.   And then, another beetle scurried from the area of the drain.  I gave in.  It was time to move beyond my aversion.  I picked up the dead beetle and threw it in the toilet.  I finished my shower with the second beetle.  The next morning I saw a beetle in the hall and a lizard climbing the wall. “Good morning Mr. Beetle and Ms. Lizard.  I greet you and I honor your journey.  If you value your life, you will want to stay away from my feet!”

 Lizards and beetles, the roosters on the road vying with the Imam to be first to call us to prayer, cats on the driveway and along the roads, barking dogs, the horses on Jl Malioboro hauling the tourists—all calling me to simplicity, to the cycles of life and death, to the ways we inhabit this earth together