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32 Utah Cabin Under Heaven, July 3 Today is Insect day in this world, and the sun has invented all of these creatures who now work ceaselessly in the grasses and trees surrounding the cabin: the bees, ten kinds of bees, some who whistle or is it sizzle as they bump against the eaves in some kind of labor; and the flies, twenty kinds, some very small who still retain the ability to bite, and the gorgeous and feared horsefly on my shoelaces, standing there in twenty blinking facets, rubbing her forearms together as if rolling up her sleeves for the duties to come; and the little beetles, narrow as exclamation points, but less excited ; and the one hornet all alone dragging his golden quotation mark legs through the air looking for a mate so they could quote something; and the butterflies through whose wings the sun shines completely, orange and brown, and flying in hiccups or so it seems to the inept human observer. The sun doesn’t shine through many parts of his human body, maybe the shellbacks of the ears, but it doesn’t shine through his ribcage, which he so desires. The trillion ants are imperturbable; they don’t act like it is crowded, and the glistening black ants walk around like dogs, some of them wearing leashes and shiny colors. When the human spilled grape jam on the kitchen counter, suddenly there was a black ant. He’d found the motherlode and he nosed the jam and then circled the sink to tell his three buddies back by the wall. The human interrupted their plan, and when he swiped them carefully up in a paper towel, they came popping out of it with a skill that goes back a millennium, survivors, but they were escorted thus quickly to the front lawn. Certainly they regathered there, all four, and the three asked the one with a purple mouth: what did it taste like? Is it really good? The human knows that he will see them again. and there is the little quick gray spider in the bathtub who always comes out when the human appears; the gray spider wants to see who’s messing, and who the hell cleaned up all the flies? does the human think he killed them for nothing? He’s late for lunch. It is a day of insects, but a human being needs to stand still to see them. To look at the ground is to see a cosmos in motion; there’s an ant climbing a long blade of grass, three inches, and then disappointed at the top, he climbs down. He thought this elevator went to the tenth floor. He hoped actually it went up to the hummingbird feeder from which the drop of sugar he’d chased had fallen. On hands and knees, the human can raise his gigantic head and see the far hills, imbedded with red rocks like jewels in a crazy present for the king, and between where his hands rest in the 33 dirt and those rocks there are unlimited creatures blessing the earth, uncountable motions in brief lives, and the human wishes with his human heart, which is an imprecise instrument, that he could find god here, that god would appear. But he may have. The human heart may not be the right tool for the job. It’s like trying to paint a picture with a drum. Or something. The human knows he loves this world, and that his sadness is a blessing of some kind which will either be revealed to him or not, but he will use the days to breath and to call himself to mindfulness, some of the time. ...

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