Care

Photo: Mating Horseflies, Sparkill, August 2023.

Insects are amongst the most extraordinary creatures we have around us, and yet we don’t care about them very much—even though our lives absolutely depend on their activities, we seem to expend a great deal too much force seeking ways to exterminate almost all of them.

When I wrote this series of essays “Notes for the Reformation” several months ago, I did a single edit and then left it without writing the last intended section, which was entitled "care."

My many years of careful investigation, conducted from within the intelligence of sensation, intellect, and feeling, on the ground floor of molecular being, have led me to quite clearly see that I’m inadequate. I’ll say that generically since it correctly applies in all directions.

I’m furthermore inadequate in very ordinary and prosaic ways; and while I can't say for sure whether others are inadequate or not, my estimation based on how vulgar my own inadequacies are is that almost all of us are equally inadequate, either in one way or another or, as seems more likely, in many different ways. The chief feature of inadequacy, furthermore, is the conviction that I’m adequate.