Habit Creature 5: Saving Beetles
One last hurrah
Ahh, boo — another re-pub. Oh, but I love this one. Oh, but that’s what this space is supposed to be. Well, and it wouldn’t be me without the repetition — haven’t we learned that? I leave you with beetles — with the creeping crawling feeling that everything is impossibly familiar, that maybe we’ve all been here before.
There is a certain time of evening in Los Angeles’ Elysian Park when the beetles come out. And maybe I say this because this is the time that I am in Elysian Park and I think I am a beetle beckoner, or I think the sun revolves around me, what I mean is: maybe the beetles are always out and I am listening only for the sound of the trees falling in the forest at the time that I am ready for the trees to fall.
Beetles have hard shells and soft underbellies and eyelash legs, and once while I was running, I saw one flipped on its back and I went five steps past before I tracked back to kneel down and flick it over because I felt a pull, I felt incriminated, something in me related — the helplessness of being on my back and having my stomach showing, being silent, feeling small.
Something inside me was recognized when that beetle walked away, maybe the part of me that wants to walk away too, maybe the part that’s still lying on its back.
Now, when I run in Elysian Park, I am searching for beetles, perhaps because I enjoy the rush of feeling like a savior in private, or because on these evenings, I am looking for myself.
Beetles have shown up a few times in my life: in history classes in the form of amulets, a specialty shop in Portland (frozen in resin), on hiking trails, crawling between teeth inside nightmares.
The beetles I find on my summer evenings are, after a little bit of research and a disclosure that I by no means see myself as any sort of insect expert, often called “head-stander” or “clown” beetles, because they point their rears upwards when they sense danger.
I wonder if the beetle I found that day — weeks ago — had landed how it was because it had been startled, or if a dog or stray foot had knocked it, I wonder how we all end up on our backs, and if it is in that state of not being able to see the ground, not being able to find our feet, that we wait for some wind or a gracious hand to turn us around again — whether fate or conscious effort, we wind up standing, again.
I wonder what it means to be named after how you react to threat, to have your means of survival compared to circus, I think of these beetles and try to imagine what it would feel like to have them crawl on my skin, how that would be different than the feeling of them uncontrollably beneath my feet, to cause hurt on accident, and to walk away with legs on my shoes, head-standing and foot-bent, threatened.
The Elysian Park trail is littered with beetle carcasses — remnants of a life made collectible, where something that can be taxidermied can also be helpless, complex, a dancer.
Sometimes, these summer nights in the park, I find myself laying on my stomach on the dirt path, imagining what it would feel like to have my entire being the size of an eyeball, to live in a kingdom, to have people in contention over whether or not I feel pain.
Elysian, I learned recently, means “relating to or characteristic of heaven or paradise:” a place where beetles go to die.
I wrote this essay over a year ago now about Elysian Park in Los Angeles, and last week I watched smoke rise from that same hillside. Firefighters put it out quickly, and we were lucky. Others were not so lucky. As the world moves on (gosh, how there are so many things to worry about and somehow, everyday, more), I wanted to share a song by dear sweet
. All money from this song will go to support victims of the Eaton Fire. Download it if you can. Jensen writes like, well, like if I was a better writer and also I could sing.Until next time, my friends <3
