At the new abode of Joye/Nathan/Jasper, way up in Bonny Doon, there’s a rambling multi-room outbuilding, and one part of this is being converted into what Joye referred to as the Man Shack. I think it’s going to be a sacred space where the great mysteries are explored. I base this conjecture on the fact that Nathan built an outer wall for the room out of cardboard moving boxes and packing tape, to keep the chickens from wandering in. If chickens aren’t allowed, whatever’s going on has got to be serious business.

The only proper place for chickens in a Man Shack is on the altar, where blood sacrifices happen at the full moon. I just made that up, but it might be true. You start with a Man Shack and end up with a creepy Inner Sanctum, where you have a dress code involving burlap and barbed wire, and severe penalties for betraying secrets; and in the environs of which small animals are subject to unexplained disappearances. Nobody intends for it to get so gruesome, but one thing leads to another and there you are, unable to include the hens in your fun without exposing their innards. It happens all the time.

It doesn’t happen all the time. Forget I said any of that. I don’t want you to get the wrong idea about the Man Shack, which might not even be called the Man Shack anymore. The wall of cardboard boxes to keep out the chickens is real, though, and I was very impressed by it.

In the course of constructing this wall, Nathan found a large and vigorous monster bug. He trapped it in a box and brought it over to show to Jasper and me when we came back from our wanderings. I wish I could remember exactly how Nathan described his initial encounter with this bug, because it was hilarious. I only remember one word: he said the monster bug seemed “sentient.”

If you had seen this thing in action, you would’ve agreed with him. When provoked, it reared up on its back legs and made a series of noises that could only be the nastier phrases of a discordant insect language. It seemed to shake its fists and threaten some startling action, like maybe stabbing every single one of us in the eyeballs simultaneously. I don’t know how it would do this, probably by releasing its jagged legs through the air like darts and instantly growing new ones just as lethal as the originals.

Something bad would happen if you pushed this bug far enough, that much was clear.

We stood around it in its prison, the two taller humans wearing the same expression of repulsed fascination on our faces and the shorter human wearing an expression of growing delight.

You’ll be completely unsurprised to hear that Jasper was thrilled by the arrival of this monster bug in his life. He didn’t try to touch it, but he did want a closer look, so I got it into a jar and we rolled it around and examined its underside. Inside the jar the horrible thing struggled and screamed and thunked against the glass. “Should we punch air holes in the lid?” Jasper wondered. “No,” I said, “I think it’s got enough air to last for a while, and besides, I do NOT want to do anything to this bug that might be interpreted as an act of aggression.”

“I want to poke it with a stick,” said Jasper.

“Well, that will be between you and the bug,” I told him. “Let’s put it into the box again and you can poke it all you want. Or at least chase it around for a while. Try not to hurt it, though.”

Monster bug was transferred back into the box, and it began to crawl alarmingly fast to the top. “Oh no, it’s getting out! We need something with slippery sides!” I cried. The Lincoln Logs were dumped out of their metal barrel, and the bug was dumped in. Jasper found his poking stick and got to work on the important childhood task of harassing a large insect. I happened to have the macro lens with me that day, so I got to work on the important adulthood task of getting some close-ups of an insect’s weird physique.

For a while we were both absorbed in our work. Jasper was silent for a long time, deep in concentration. “Flip it over with your poking stick!” I urged him. “I want to get some pictures of its belly and its little fur vest.” Jasper complied. The more he poked at it and chased it around, the more it waved its fists at us and made those terrible noises. It thrashed its body around so much that I found it almost impossible to get a clear shot.

After a while, I didn’t really want to take any more macro shots. This thing was gross-looking at such close range, and even worse, it was scared. How long had it been living in the Man Shack, undisturbed by humans? Months? Years? It was such a huge bug, it might be a venerable elder in its tribe. It might be somebody’s grandpa or grandma, depended on to pass along the wisdom of the species to the young monsters. I began to feel very sorry for this creature, whose fate had been utterly altered in the course of a few hours, whose bugly dignity had been stripped away, and whose evil confidence had been turned into abject fear at the end of Jasper’s poking stick. As had happened when I watched Jasper playing with the lizard of the previous post, I began to secretly hope for an animal’s escape.

I didn’t realize just then the full extent of the psychological torment we were inflicting on the monster bug. Later, when I looked at this next shot, I suddenly understood the terror this thing must’ve experienced when we so blithely dumped it into the shiny Lincoln Logs barrel. It had probably gone into a state of frothing apoplexy when confronted with its enormous reflection.

I stared at my monster bug photos for a while today and tried to come up with some moral to the story, some nugget of wisdom, but I could think of nothing besides Ewwww and Oh my god what IS that stuff it’s shedding? and other typically human-biased thoughts. (I left out the photos of the stuff it was shedding, because I want people to actually come back to this blog after this post.)

Photos of a bug, I thought, photos of a bug, what to do…oh, I know! I’ll run them through the Delphic Oracle. Oh Delphic Oracle, I typed, what message does this monster bug have for me today?

The result appears at the top of the post. Once again, the Delphic Oracle has stunned me with its accuracy. It feels like the right answer, even though I don’t really know what it means. If you have any interpretations, please share them in the comments.

I thought the appearance of the Lizard of Resolved Paradoxes the other day was a random, isolated event, but I was wrong.

Yesterday when I went to Bonny Doon for Friday Jasper and Betta Time, we met that lizard’s brother (sister?). While exploring a greenhouse at the farm next door, we heard a scuttling within a watering can. I looked inside. “Jasper, it’s a lizard!” I yelped. Jasper has been trying to catch a lizard ever since he moved to the country last month, to no avail. Here was his chance. “Just reach into this watering can,” I told him. “There’s no way he can escape you now.” Jasper put in his hand and after a few moments of frantic struggling (lizard) and frantic giggling (Jasper), his hand emerged holding a lizard by its tail. Victory!

Ah, it is a sweet moment, that first lizard capture. What a privilege to see it happen to my favorite person.

Jasper was thrilled by his catch and determined to keep the lizard for a pet. But he’s a four-year-old boy who needs both hands for important investigations, so it fell to me to carry the lizard in my right hand (my left hand was already occupied by an overflowing basket of strawberries) as we made our way slowly back home. We made many stops and detours, as we always do, each detour being its own separate story. The lizard grew still and solemn in my hand during this long journey.

Occasionally Jasper tried to gain its trust by petting its tiny head and speaking to it in soothing tones, but the hearts of newly captured lizards are not to be won in this way, and the poor thing thrashed about alarmingly in my hand. “Come on, Jasper, let’s take this guy home!” I urged my fearless leader. “He doesn’t like the feeling of being held by a human.” Jasper asked why he didn’t like that feeling, and what would a human hand feel like to a lizard, and many other questions allowing for deliciously vast leaps of imaginative speculation.

When we reached home, Nathan was surprised to see what we’d found. He told me that Jasper had dreamed about a lizard that morning, and upon waking had sleepily asked Nathan “what kind of lizard was that?” I told him I’d written a blog post about a lizard just two days before. We didn’t have time to analyze the synchronicity just then, because this real-life lizard needed a place to stay. Nathan provided the perfect box, to be filled with lizard-oriented stimuli, and the beleaguered reptile was released from my oppressive human grasp at last.

Jasper wanted to find some food for our lizard, and possibly another lizard to be his friend, so we set off down the road with a butterfly net and a specimen bag. On the road, we had a very interesting conversation, another thing we always do. This is what Jasper looked like when the discussion got deep:

In the photo above he looks to me like the most perfect combination of the expression and posture of both his parents, two people who are capable of dropping into profound discourse with anyone at a moment’s notice. It’s one of those fascinating glimpses of the adult he will become.

It should be noted, however, that his parents rarely have this much dirt on their faces.

Part of our conversation was about numbers. Jasper is beginning to think about them frequently and apply them to real life. The numberless sea of his babyhood seems to me like it happened just last week, so it felt strange to watch him using his fingers to add up how many cars had passed us since we started our walk (four! unusual for that amount of time on a country road like his).

We did not, however, catch any animals, even though Jasper practiced by catching himself.

When we returned from our search, it was time to have a good look at the lizard. Our new friend was placed upon a variety of surfaces, and held upside down, and probed and tickled all over his indignant lizard body. His scratchy toes were observed and discussed, and his colorful belly was greatly admired.

With all of this scrutiny, the lizard’s anxiety level began to rise again; he went into frenzies of motion that made him very hard to hold onto. I remembered the lizards of my childhood, and knew that a time was soon to come when one of these bids for independence would succeed. And so it did: he got away!

His adventure had a happy ending, if lizards who are uprooted from their homes and transported to new locations can ever be happy again. He escaped from Jasper, and ran under the deck, where we are sure he has found the peace and quiet and insects we couldn’t provide for him in our human world, and where nobody holds him upside down by his tail.

He’s the Lizard of Resolved Paradoxes, known also as The Angel of Peace.

My pal Olivia was giving away The Angel Oracle deck and its accompanying guidebook (by Ambika Wauters), and did I want it? I said sure, why not? The Angel Oracle sounds awful cheesy, but it’s probably not a downer or anything, so I’ll give it a try. I took deck and book home and added them to my repertoire of solitary rituals, my bag of tricks for staying calm in the moment and dissecting that same moment to reveal its anatomical intricacies. (That sentence sounds a lot more profound than what actually happens around here.)

The interpretation that accompanies each card is spot-on, and soothing to read; the sort of words that leave me feeling like all is well in Heaven and Earth, and I was just being silly when I thought for a minute it wasn’t. If I’m in a certain state of mind, the illustrations on the card seem lovely, with creamy countenances galore and a pleasing range of golden and red hues. But after a while they all kind of blend together, the individual angels not being shockingly unique in appearance. It’s serenity all the way with these guys, doves and fruit and babies in their arms, a marked lack of affect about the face. I leave them be and find other creatures to illustrate each new angel topic. There are always other creatures around, just waiting to be clad with heavenly raiment. Like the rat I saw running on a power line, the beetle Jasper decapitated in the woods, the tree in the courtyard.

Tonight I drew The Angel of Peace, and smirked at it with self-approval because yes, I did feel peaceful today, even in situations that left me tongue-tied and spastic. Or impatient and sweaty. Looking at the card, I wondered how I managed to accomplish this today, what with all the frantic emailing and calendaring, not to mention the consumption of what my galloping heart tells me was at least 40 milligrams too much caffeine. How was I able to be both a nervous nutcase and a peaceful soul? Can I repeat this accomplishment on other days? The Angel of Peace (it’s relaxing to keep typing that name) was ready with the answer:

Once we have released our primary fears about basic survival we start to learn to trust in the goodness of life. Many of us may reach this level of development as we mature and after we have weathered crisis, pain or loss, only to find that we are fine and deeply intact at our core. At our very centre we are pure peace, and this cannot be destroyed or diminished by external circumstances. We can choose to identify with this part of ourselves when we open our hearts to The Angel of Peace.

Once we have resolved the conflicts within ourselves, our lives begin to take on a deeper sense of peace and order which lets us flourish as the unique and creative beings we are. It is only when we are at peace that we can truly be creative. Otherwise we are limited to continually re-enacting the painful traumas of our lives.

Well, great! I thought upon reading the above. Fine and deeply intact at our core! Released our primary fears about basic survival! I’ll try to remember that. But who or what can truly represent The Angel of Peace to me tonight? No offense to the beautiful angels depicted, but I need something with more snap to it. I dove into my Pinnacles Lightroom database and immediately ran into this lizard.

It’s the sly, confident glimmer in his (her?) eye that makes him seem so peaceful to me. I added some mildly psychedelic enhancements to bring out his party shaman vibe. Like he’s got the situation under control, and by the way, his friends are having an intriguing discussion a few rocks over and would you care to join them? Yeah, they’re a fun crowd, definitely mellow, mostly lizards like me. No, no, you’d totally fit in, any friend of mine gets star treatment. I ordered a pizza, it’ll be here any second now. Do you want a beer? Glass of lemonade? Five-gallon bucket of caramel ice cream? Just say the word.

Would they what-? would my friends think you’re weird? You mean because you’re human and stuff happened to you? No way, baby, you just have a little faith in The Angel of Peace here, I wouldn’t steer you wrong. Just put down that paradox and have some fun.

I’ve been thinking how that last post needs a follow-up of some kind. I remember very clearly the moment I took that photo, and everything that led up to it, and the moment when I consulted the Delphic Oracle and got that answer. Part of me wanted to explain it all as soon as I put the two together, because it felt amazing and I wanted to share that with you.

But another part of me denied that motion, saying Don’t You Remember How We Value Our Privacy Around Here? The two parts wrestled, as they often do, and then life was busy and full of small tasks to distract the Oh Come On Let’s Just Say It part of me. Photo sorting, emails about logistics, other people’s problems. Let’s Just Say It me was overwhelmed and exhausted; Value Our Privacy me won once again, and no further explanation was posted.

But I can outwit the shy private part of me sometimes if I wait long enough. Though I am beginning to tire of this strategy.

Anyway: that magic moment of blissful connection between two beetles was captured on a walk next to the ocean during a solitary vacation week, and it was the emotional climax of my trip. Of the entire season of fascinating emotional revelations, of an entire era of thinking.

My vacation week was spent, in accordance with carefully laid plans, pondering past love affairs and putting them all into a narrative. This was not my first time doing this kind of detailed analysis. It’s impressive how much time I’m capable of spending in going over my past relationships and describing them to myself. (An earlier version of me would’ve said “embarrassing” instead of “impressive” but the current version of me is not, in fact, embarrassed, which just goes to show how far cheesy affirmations can take you if you repeat them on a daily basis.)

Ever since my most recent relationship ended a few years ago, I’ve used glorious, spacious singlehood as an opportunity to mine my life’s romantic experiences for every possible nugget of insight. Why? Because I could; because I’d never really had the chance to do it before, having been for so many years one of those people who is always in one relationship after another with little or no break in between. Being single has meant there’s nobody close by who cares all that much about who I was involved with and how they affected me. Nobody’s been in my personal space to be pleased or displeased when I think about past lovers, or tell me I’m giving the matter too much meticulous consideration, or disagree with my conclusions, or imply that I should be ashamed of myself. Alone with my thoughts, I’ve found shame increasingly irrelevant.

When shame fled, I started enjoying the process of dissecting my love life under a microscope. I would take those experiences of love and tease them into their component parts. I’d analyze their weight, their chemical composition. Set them on fire, smear them on glass, view them under various magnifications. This analysis usually took on a written form, but sometimes I’d say it all out loud, re-telling a love story in the forest or some other place where nobody could hear me.

I was completely fascinated by not just my own love history but also the love history of others. Eventually I found that the love history of others was becoming more interesting to me than my own. I found that I was starting to make up fictional variations on my personal history, incorporating what I heard from others and what I’d read in books. When I realized I was doing this, I suddenly understood that my time of analyzing my own past relationships so closely was coming to an end.

This is the conclusion of an important phase of my life (I intoned inwardly in a solemn voice) and it calls for a kind of graduation ceremony. A rite of passage. Thus I decided I would dedicate my vacation trip to reviewing what I’d learned during my extended contemplation. The solitary natural setting and the isolation would, I was sure, make this review of the past into a most memorable and satisfying experience. I even made a schedule for my days- I’d make my way through my relationship history chronologically, and each half day would correspond to a certain number of years. On the final evening, I’d reach the end of my most recent relationship, and peace would reign in my world.

This trip is going to be perfect, I thought. I am going to feel so smart. I will, in fact, know everything about love, and I’ll know it in a beautiful outdoor location with nobody else around to contradict my findings. I’ll have a camera in my hand and an ipod holding all the relevant music from my past and a notebook for recording my smartness. I will exult in my detachment and my wisdom, and when it’s all over, I will be DONE with that project.

I didn’t count on the stomach pain. Some kind of virus invaded my body just as the week began. Its only symptom was terrible abdominal cramps every time I ate anything at all. They’d subside after an hour or so, and I didn’t feel sick otherwise, which meant that I did have some cramp-free time to wander around and take pictures. But then I’d get hungry on the trail, eat a snack, and the cramps would start again.

Pain produced an interesting psychological effect during these hikes. It was a rogue factor in my vacation equation. Instead of feeling comfortable and complacent as I recalled my brilliant philosophical conclusions about love, I was often doubled over clutching my stomach. I found myself tempted to give in to bleak despair. I was flooded with physical memories of being unhappy in love. Also happy in love, and unable to deal with it, which can be almost as hard to take as the unhappiness.

I’ve always felt my most extreme emotions in my stomach, from the time I was a wee sensitive nerdling. You can bet that every time I’ve ever felt extremely sad (or extremely happy) about the way things were going with a lover, I’ve gotten a stomachache, sometimes for weeks on end. I was being reminded, not that I asked for it, of how those events I had so carefully analyzed had happened to a physical body, one whose sensations I couldn’t fully remember anymore.

That’s the missing piece, I thought, sipping hot tea after my first day of hiking, hand on my belly. In my analysis, I have drifted away from how the love I felt made me forget how to breathe, made me feel faint with delight, made me feel pain and pleasure in very specific places, and how I experienced it in my body as much as in my mind.

I kept going with my scheduled reminiscences (I am slavishly devoted to my schedule) but with each story from the past now came a physical memory of the sensations that went with it. I felt confusion creep into my conclusions. In my years of living without the daily demands of a love relationship, I’d forgotten my frustration with the ongoing fight between my mind and my body. I carried that fight into every love affair. Whether I wanted to admit it or not, I was having that fight with myself every day. The struggle with each lover had been a mirror of some internal war.

On the last evening of my vacation, I was walking a bluff trail, clutching my stomach and holding my camera and talking to myself about the significance of event X in my life, how it led to Y and then Z. Suddenly, there they were: the beetles pictured in the previous post. I didn’t know what they were doing at first but I recognized them as something that must be photographed. They didn’t appear to be moving. I switched to the macro lens and got down on the ground, every movement making the stomach pain worse. It wasn’t until I looked at them through the lens that I realized what those beetles were up to in that golden sunset light next to the ocean.

They looked so well-armored that I couldn’t imagine how they managed to connect to each other. I thought, what a struggle it must be to get attached and stay that way, when both parties are so hard-shelled and slippery, and in danger of being stepped on at any moment by wandering humans. And yet connect they did, each knowing exactly how to reach the parts of the other that mattered. Did they think about what they were doing? Was it a carefully considered decision, this mating on the path? Who could ever know?

I took pictures of them from every possible angle and then stood up, out of breath, my face wet with tears. There it was: the struggle and danger of love, and its reward. I could not get away from it. They are braver than I am, I thought, and they’re just beetles.

I am a person who likes to feel in control of what’s going on in my life. Just like everyone else, I guess. And I am very, very good at keeping the mind above the body, somehow floating above it, not quite experiencing what’s going on in my physical reality, entranced by ideas, fiction, words, fantasies. But the corporeal follows me, upsets my plans at every turn, asks me to integrate it. I keep trying to escape and it pulls me back. There are many dilemmas, and this is one of mine.

Thoughts of this dilemma were hovering as I looked at that beetle photo, but I couldn’t quite put them into words, though I stared and stared and tried so hard it made me dizzy. I turned to the Delphic Oracle for help, and the answer I got was so perfectly true that I found myself crying again. (Does that ever happen to you? Does the truth ever make you cry?)

I know what forever opposes me, and I know desire is caught up in that opposition. I know it is always changing into something else, and so am I. But I never knew, until that moment, that what forever opposes me could be the source of beauty. The more I think about it, the more I realize it makes perfect sense.