In the quiet space beneath this antique apple tree outside the door, a gentle churn of consumption is audible in the deepening early evening dark. There is an ambient rustle of dropping leaf pieces falling constantly, creating a noticeable crinkle of sound texture in the presence of this grandparent tree and its near neighboring, also antique, apple tree. The once caterpillar filled tents webbed onto the limbs of the trees are emptying into the foliage canopy of forage. I remember as a kid witnessing these wanton caterpillars raging in the crowns, and thinking, “I’ve got to help these trees!” At the time that meant kill the bugs. Before I knew it I had a pot of gasoline, had climbed up to a tent, pulled the bugs out, and dropped them in the gas pot. I had at the time, and have had most of the time, a microscopic view of a macroscopic thing.
Daylight reveals the porous and ground up nature of the tree’s leaves, as well as, the scraps of the feast littered like confetti all around. It dawns on me that these elderly trees have already survived aggressive bug appetite swarms. This has definitely happened in their lifetime before; probably more than once. The desire to kill anything in the effort to make things better is really quiet quizzical..
Let it be. There’s probably not a hungry bird anywhere around here. These apple trees are supporting the local natural community this way this year. There’s nothing fundamentally wrong. Nature is meta-stable. It’s ok. This is an ego issue. The notion that trees need preservative, protection, and security from nature itself is really shortsighted. Vanity animated people work to “improve” conditions without any regard for the delicate agility of Nature’s balancing act. This deprives what is to be for the insistence of fortifying what ego-logic says should be. Treating perceived symptoms of variance from “normal” in the natural world is a working metaphor for modernity routinely toxifying the environment so that things can appear right. At the risk of exaggeration, let’s just say that it makes as much sense as lighting a forest on fire to get rid fo the poison ivy. It gets bonkers man.
So goes the eccentric wobble of the the modern world. While it’s possible to identify with the gut reaction of a naive kid gas saturating an unwanted invader, there’s no easy way to reconcile the extremities of aggressive large scale warfare that industrialized workings have employed for generations now. We’re so far past keep your hands off our life support systems that the system itself is sort of unrecognizable. Thank God for this year’s invasion of caterpillars! There’s no freakin trouble. So it looks different; big deal!! As Mother Nature catches her balance, life continues to thrive and bulge in abundance. Maybe all the pending metamorphic energy will have some kind of transformative influence on us. Maybe just enough to break the spell of belief in the formula for a full life includes killing everything else.