They, the insects (the tiny people) will not abandon us followed by a reflection

Cricket
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Here's the thing -

The thing turns out not to be the thing.

The no-thing is the new thing.

We are back to square one or square minus-one

And then the square turns out to be a rectangle

The rectangle, a memory of four-walls.

Time out! Just follow me for a moment

But watch your step

The path is disappearing around us

Its edges merging with the not-path.

We have come this way before

And before before before,

But this time we are lucid.

There is no easy way to say this

But we are lost!

But there is still hope

Because we are lost together.

Just focus on those voices far away.

They will not abandon us

Even though we abandoned them.

They are our icaro.

We thought that we were better with our thing,

And so we let it multiply into an infinity of things.

But now that we are lost

And the thing is not the thing

And our path has become no-path

We are becoming loveable again!

And the tiny far-away voices

Are those insects,

But they seem to be singing words

Like tiny people.

And now we are remembering something original.

It was the fateful day

When we all removed our furs and feathers

And danced beneath the moon.

Spirit played a trick on us

And sent a great eagle to take back our skins.

And so we had to steal fire and kill our relatives

To cover our nakedness.

We cooked our relatives,

And smacked our lips,

And spirit said to anyone who was listening,

These naked creatures are going to be nothing but trouble!

(Well, you can say that again!)

These naked creatures will have to have names

But I will call them humans

And they will make terrible things out of fire

And they will think they are creators

But all they will do is take, take, take.

And they will consume everything because

Eventually their grief will overwhelm them

Like a giant hole

And they will try to fill it.

Can't you do anything? asked the rock.

What's done is done, said spirit.

They have to come to the end of their grieving.

There will be a day when the path merges with the not-path.

(That is what spirit said to rock.)

And rock said, I will keep their path from disappearing

For as long as they need a path

And until all their things become non-things

And they realize that their walls cannot protect them

Then they will hear you, spirit.

And they will hear me.

They will step off the path that is not a path

And they will feel their nakedness under their clothes

And they will remember,

One by one

(Just like I am remembering right now)

That there was a time before time

When everything was one nation

One world of beingness

And there was no-thing,

Nothing, that wasn't loveable and alive

And didn't have a voice.
...................
Reflection:
I let our lawn grow long now for my neighbors, the insects. When I retell this old story of how animals were once people and people animals, that is not to say that animals were humans and humans animals. The word "people" goes back to the idea of "a people", plural, as in a nation, a collective, such as the nation of frogs or the nation of buffalos, or the nation of birds, so, the buffalo-people, the bird-people, the snake-people and the stone-people. And all these peoples and nations of peoples were equal to each other. They all had flaws and they all had medicine and one nation might require the help of another nation to overcome some problem, or they might compete but there was over-all equality and mutual respect among the nations because all the peoples were spirit's creations. Ants were equal to bison and the bird people were equal to the snake people. At some point humans are created and they are different from the other peoples, but there is a period when that difference is muddy. It only becomes an issue when human-people begin to sequester themselves from the other nations by wanting more than they were given. This creates a growing rift that widens until the nations of the peoples down-grades to an apartheid where there is humans over here and the animals over there. By the old world view, Humans are not people. They are a collective of egos, each for him or herself. Animals begin to forget that they were once great sovereign nations because the original plan of creation was for creation to be shared by all the nations. When humans stepped away from the animals and started expecting more favors from spirit, everything unravelled. In this poem, I am imagining that we, humans, have come to an end of our human path. Our four walls (which are existential walls) cannot protect us from the looming disintegration of our human world-view that allowed us to hold ourselves above every other living thing. There is one line that says that the song of the insects is our icaro. An icaro is the song that the shaman sings or plays during a healing ceremony that follows the initiate in his or her soul-journey to guide them home, that is, home to their original home, which is home to the realization that we humans are also people, no better or worse than the fish-people or the insect people. And by singing to us throughout our soul-journey or initiation, the insects are letting us know that, even though we abandoned them, trying to spray them into oblivion for the last hundred years or so, they have not abandoned us.