Arriving at Awareness
Favorite childhood book, bugs, and sitting in my front yard.
I absolutely loved the book Snug House Bug House as a kid.
The premise is as follows:
Some bug friends are wandering around in a field. They find a tennis ball, see it as a hallmark of possibility, and turn it into their house. Their snug house bug house, to be precise. The book, in mostly single syllable words, outlines and displays through drawing the process of construction. The planning phases, bulldoze, phases, foundation and framing phases. At move-in time, we get to see all the bugs in each of their own rooms displayed on different pages, personality and taste highlighted. The dust mite named Dot is drawn to an assortment of stuffed animals. While Fred the butterfly has an array of plants. Also highlighted are the common rooms of hobbies shared by all the bugs. There’s the “crazy room” with it’s assortment of carnival esque flair and equipment. Then the “round room”, seated at the top of the tennis ball. It has no other decor or furniture apart from a centrally placed carousel. No clue what the Zestimate on this place might be. What it lacks in square footage, it certainly makes up for in character!
All the pieces that led to me enjoying this book? Not sure, but just some guesses:
I loved finding tennis balls. The reasoning being that my brother and I would practice hockey in the backyard endlessly, firing pucks at (or above, to the left, right or through) the net. The not-in-the-net pucks had gotten to the point of destroying the garage door and shattering the garage windows, so shooting pucks eventually became banned by our father. To replace them, my brother and I started using tennis balls. Their softer material not only being kinder to the garage, but also to anyone chasing to play goalie. No one wants a puck shot at them. Jack and I would scour areas around tennis courts trying to find left behind balls to fuel our hockey habit. Even today I get giddy when I find a tennis ball in a field. I can relate to the glee the bugs felt when they found theres!
Next up… My Grandfather was a carpenter / contractor. He would drop me off or pick me up from elementary all the way through high school a good amount. Both my parents worked and I didn’t have a car. Alongside the crumbs of his favorite nutty donuts were endless tools littered on the floor of his 2002 white Chevy Trailblazer. Saw blades in the back sleeve behind the seat, a huge tool drawer chest filling the trunk. The occasional drill bit rolled forward as we stopped at red lights. Growing up I occasionally got to see his job sites. I have faint memory of him helping build an addition on my childhood home. Similar to the way Fred the butterfly swung his hammer laying the foundation of the tennis ball body, I can picture Gramps swinging his as he pounded in second story floorboards. In some way, residential construction felt like a part of my identity as part of his lineage. The legend went that between him and my Great Grandfather, his Dad, they had built nearly half the homes in my hometown. Legend being of course being the key word here. But driving around as a child, I looked at each home wondering if it was a Christie construction.
But at the risk of not overcomplicating things, the ultimate reason I loved Snug House Bug House was an absolute love of bugs. Bugs rocked. As a kid, I loved them so much. They fascinated me. I recently asked my Mom and Dad what they thought I would do for a career around when I was 6 or 7. My Dad immediately said a scientist given how often I was on the ground watching bugs money around. I would stare as rollie pollies would navigate the unmade garden beds of our backyard. They travelled alongside the brick foundation, using it as a guide. I would all but press my face directly up against them, trying to understand where they were going and how their little legs moved. Getting so close I’d end up scaring them through the wind of my breath as they would retreat into a rolled-up ball.
At my other grandparents home, where they lived on 10 acres of land, I’d search and find any and every rock I could on the property. With heightened anticipation, I’d flip the rock over to see what world I might find beneath. Giant worms slurped back into the soil. Slippery centipedes scurried for cover, pools of what seemed thousands of ants all up to who knows what. For my little mind, with every rock, there was some new surprise, some type of living, breathing, heart beating entity that maybe, just maybe, I had never come across before. Not to mention all the ones above ground. The endless dragonflies I’d have staring contests with, grasshoppers I could hear but never find, fireflies that boggled my childhood brain so much that my adult brain couldn’t help but write a book using them as the central metaphor.
So, it’s pretty clear why a book around bugs — building a home — out of a tennis ball appealed to me. Whether consciously or not as a kid, I loved snug house bug house because it spoke to an awareness I had about my context.
Now I’m teetering toward 30. I work from home for my full-time gig. Four days a week, 10 hour days. Lots of time on a computer reading and responding to emails, taking video calls, etc. There are certainly many benefits to this. One of the more interesting hurdles tied to it though are what I have noticed has started to happen to my eyes after a long day of work. When I shut my computer off and attempt to look at something not housed on a screen, I have a hard time holding focus. Like literally holding the focus of an object with my eyes. It is mostly smaller things but even something like looking at Ollie, Emily and I’s 60 pound Aussie… if I gaze for too long at him in this post-work haze, he gets a little fuzzy.
All you medically minded folks would likely encourage a visit to the ophthalmologist at this point. But have no fear. In time, 30-60 minutes or so, my eyes adjust and I’m back to normal, especially if I chose to avoid looking at my phone for a bit when I log off work. Which is a whole other thing. Doom scroll, news consumption, political Reddit banter (save us all); it all exists on those same focus-fuzzying screens and with topics like that, it’s not just my eyes that get blurry but my brain. So I’ve started doing something everyday I’m off work. Or even when I’m not working but have spent too long reading up on [insert hot topic political/social/cultural issue here]. But I’ll get to that in a second.
Tennis balls, house building, and my childhood (and current!) affinity for bugs share an orbit. A sun of awareness illuminating a moving earth of context. I’ve been ruminating on these two words a lot lately, context and awareness. Context being the circumstances or attributes that define a setting; awareness being the engagement with those circumstances and attributes. As a kid, my awareness wasn’t something I necessarily intended for, but it happened. You don’t really need the parameters of intention as a child, at least I don’t think as much. Perhaps all the great mystics encouraging us to be like children are encouraging us to let intention become the gateway to that inherent intuition within. Perhaps as an adult, it’s that intention toward awareness that, in time, gets us back to the land of intuition. Not sure. But what I do know is that in order to escape the haze, I recognize a need I have of bringing my awareness back to my immediate context.
All those contexts within my childhood created an awareness that I latched onto. But, whether it was tennis balls, contractor tools, or bugs, that context was immediately here and now and before me, which made the awareness flow. It was in the land of my five senses. In this new blurry-eyed, post-work, doom scroll removal from my content, it’s that sensory awareness I’m finding myself being pulled back toward. I feel like I almost need it. It is mind boggling to me how so much else is trending away away from that sense-based context recognition and awareness.
When I turn back to the land of sensuous awareness born from a context I can physically enter into, there seems to be an unyielding presence inherent to even just, truly, a mere moment. A slightest of scope, a flash in time. Disheartened in many respects to the world beyond the world of simply the world right here, I decided that I would attempt to arrive at no other world, if only for a few minutes a day, than that right here one.
As of late, I have found myself cross-legged in my front yard, looking at bugs. I have found a lot here. Heartbeats and wing flutters, tall grass playing with wind, song sparrow and robin, an angular necked ant-like winged insect. I just learned these are called snakeflies yesterday! I saw three, all seated on a single plant. Around them bee swirled, dragonfly swooned. Another insect I had never seen before, this one with a brilliant reflective gold exoskeleton soared past like a UFO.
Between our house and the neighbor next door is a tiny greenbelt. Only about 20 feet long, this stretch of intentionally overgrown space is a world beyond governance of property line. My neighbor and I have both strategically withdrawn our control of it. This is not something we discussed doing, but it has happened nonetheless. Overgrown grass, massive lilac, witches briar, a dying back cottonwood over 9 feet in diameter.
After work, I come outside and sit on the last strip of mown grass that runs alongside this land of wild domain. I watch the bugs make their way from stalk to stalk of creeping bellflower. More than just bug lies back in the brush, too. I can hear signs of life. The rustling of neighborhood quail. Perhaps the porcupine that quilled the neighbor dog last year or the skunk I saw my dog chasing as I frantically called after him just last week. Child Mike would be proud though. Because more than anything else, it is the bugs that my attention is most drawn to. I focus my awareness on them.
It’s in doing this that I’ve started to think of this word context; their wings taking them to and fro, plant to plant. Each one of them has this — a context — born from the immediacy of what resides in front of them. Because of this, they are living with such punctuated purpose. This is where they are. The resting ladybug on a lower leaf. Snakefly higher up on the stalk but steering clear of the buds where pollinators drop in. I have started having staring contests with dragonflies again, like I did as a child. My face as close to them as I can get. The most recent time I did this, I recognized familiar markings on the wings of the dragonfly I bent to gaze toward. As if also acknowledging recognition of me, it rose its front right leg up in what seemed impossibly like a wave! A butterfly even crawled along my finger for a few moments before a movement I made toward my phone to take a picture scared it off.
After a few minutes observing, I tend to lie down in the grass and feel the occasional ant decide to explore the new and mysterious mound that has fallen onto its terrain, my body. I blow them off my arms and legs back onto the grass. Sometimes I turn over on my stomach, looking through the grass toward top of bellflower stalk, tree branch, and beyond. I am witnessing a world, one of so many, that exist within this World. The comings and goings, the happenings with or without me watching. I am trying to make a habit of this, coming out here everyday after the screen. Deciding to leave the phone behind after it scared the butterfly. I am inhabiting a context and bringing it to my awareness.
Remember the earth whose skin you are.
Joy Harjo
What if we spent a week, a day, hell even an hour or just 15 minutes, not attending to any context other than the one we become aware of in our own yard? In a little patch of a park you love? What might awareness within such a concentrated context open up? What might the bugs might be building?
I don’t think the spiritual sages would disagree. The Missoulan poet Chris Dombrowski alludes to this pointedly,
There is a world of sentient beings in a blade of grass said Dogen, a decade before Eckhart, continents away, said a piece of wood contains the rational image of God, for which the clergy burned him at the figurative stake. Christ the carpenter also chose a skin-to-skin departure.
At this point, there’s no great distinction between God and capital “E” Earth to me. Sure, God, the Divine, Flow, whichever word; whatever that is may run a distance greater than our planet. Perhaps even each plant is its own iteration of that reality? But to couch awareness somewhere when it comes to Divinity, I chose my context to be the Earth. So this work then, of attending to and being made aware of the happenings in my yard, has become a way in which I very tangibly am watching and witnessing God exist. Seated in the yard I am both held by, a piece of, and a witness to the Divine reality. Even if just a tiny tendril. God/Flow/Way is there, out in my yard. Letting my eyes become unblurred via soft gaze toward snakefly on bell flower.
The world is full of contexts to park ones awareness. The world as we’ve twisted and morphed and created it, through our endless access to information and news source and atrocity, is pulling us away from precisely those parking spots. What if there was no place beyond just your own yard? And what if, even for 15 minutes a day, you gave your attention to that? What might an awareness from our context create within us?
Can awareness to context spark something? Can blades of grass and the bugs of the blades and the Earth/God of it all unfurl what I’ve kept reclused amidst the blur?
I know you want to point out all the peril in the land beyond. I see it too. Yet more and more I wonder, is it curiosity over peril that causes life to trickle back? Your life — your life your life your life — to trickle back you?
What might the trickle from our awareness do for the Snuggy, Buggy House of Earth?