Getting in touch with your inner yellow-jacket wasp.

Today a yellow-jacket wasp was buzzing around the bedroom, wreaking havoc with our sense of bedroom security. I didn't want to smash it on the fresh paint job, so I got a plastic grocery bag, the tissue-thin ones you use for frozen food. By surrounding the wasp with the opening of the bag and waiting until it flew into the belly, I trapped it and then threw the bag onto the deck. The bag was translucent, I could watch the wasp angrily dart around in the wrinkles of the plastic, looking for an escape route.

At first I thought it was stuck in one furrow of plastic, but I noticed that it darted around in an energetic but apparently random fashion, pushing into openings, following seams of air, expanding its tiny field of movement. What really struck me was the energy it put into the apparent randomized attempts to push through or follow out an opening. That, in its essence, was life.

Our culture has put so much freight on the idea of learning abstracted from the point of learning, that we have reached a kind of inverse tipping point, an implosion point, where the weight of accumlated patterns seems to be crushing the will of the learner. We reward "learning" for its own sake by making an excess of learning a prerequisite for simple economic survival, i.e. you must have way too much education in order to be employed, and even more education than that in order to have some economic self determination in your career.

What if the wasp was in the bag with the strong admonition to "only buzz right until the opening is more than a millimeter, then consult the buzz authority for further direction..."

Obviously the wasp would sit there and die, happily obedient to its education and those who rewarded it for becoming educated while neglecting everything else that might give it a life.

Our cat came and watched the insect evolve an increasingly complex space of discovery within the folds of the bag. She didn't bat it around, as she usually does those things which buzz. The plastic relaxed in the warmth of the day and opened gradually. Finally I tickled it slightly with the broom and the wasp was free. Okay, I played god and ruined the symmetry of my homily, but there you are. I am just buzzing in my own plastic bag for you. Do you have the heart or decency to wield a broom handle on my behalf?