HARD TIMES FOR WASPS

Nowadays afternoon breezes are scorching hot, usually the temperature reaching 100°F or so (38°C). However, it's a crisply dry heat, so in the shade it's not bad at all if you can stay still, which I do in the afternoons. The forest is mostly dry-season leafless now, all gray and brown, looking like winter up north, despite how it feels.

Here wasps are part of everyday life the year round. The Maya workers think it's funny that I don't knock down their nests beneath the hut's thatch overhang, or squirt them with diesel, but wasps don't bother me and I like watching them. I think they've learned my odor, because sometimes workers passing by do get stung. The dogs get stung, too, but that's because they snap at the wasps, upsetting them. On a certain level I find my wasp neighbors more congenial and elegant than the smelly, panting, farting, slobbering, barking dogs programmed by their human breeders to fawn shamelessly over us humans.

For the last couple of weeks, wasps of a certain species have caught my attention because they're desperate for water. They cluster at my red-plastic wash basin, sipping. At first they landed on the basin's edge, climbed down to the water, drank, and when they started to fly off, I think they must have misjudged their weight full of water, for they'd fly directly into the water, and drown.

Woodchips and a floating saucer in the water didn't help. Eventually I discovered how to drape a washrag over the basin's side so that it wicked up water, and the wasps could land on the rag and drink without descending. A machete was laid across the basin, with the blade atop the washrag, to keep the washrag from blowing into the water. One day before I learned the machete trick, a wind gust blew the washrag into the water, and when I went there next about a dozen wasps were drowned.

I felt bad about that, about being so slow to understand how to help the wasps, not hurt them. Of course this led to the usual thoughts about wasps being such social insects. Philosophers have seriously suggested that among very social insects such as wasps, bees, ants and termites, the individual workers carrying water, gathering nectar, and such, may better be thought of as a single body's appendages, with the body's "brain" residing in the queen back at the nest. The whole colony is the individual insect, with the workers/appendages receiving their instructions not via nerves between a brain and them, but through hormones issued by the queen.

Maybe my negligence with the wash basin just diminished a single wasp being, then, instead of killing several.

When you start thinking like that, it just leads up and up. For instance, similarly you could say that all the individual beings constituting a species are just roaming-around appendages of that species' genome, in which resides information in chromosomes dispersed among all the various physical beings/appendages of that species.

Going on up, way up, maybe even all the things of the Universe are just appendages behaving according to natural laws dictating how the Universe be put together.

All this is just fun thinking. Still, this week with the scorching hot wind blowing through leafless, wintry-looking forest around my hut, and thirsty wasps dying in a red-plastic wash basin, this thinking exercise accomplished something.

For, it firmed up my impression that I, stationed at this obscure spot on our little Earth in a seemingly random corner of the swirling, turbulent, evolving Universe, am a kind of appendage of a single all-being presence. All appendages have uses, so what is mine? The only answer I can come up with is that I am to do this thinking and feeling about hot wind and dying wasps, as if I were a nerve ending -- less than a real appendage -- and to share my sensations, thinking and feeling with One Thing headquarters.