the crucifixion

From Jim Otterstrom's wonderful and remarkable "Earth Home Garden" blog in Big Bear, CA, comes this memorable photograph of a late-summer dragonfly transfixed on the crossbar of a Jeep Cherokee's plastic grille.

I've written about road kill before, for example here and here. But I've never seen the full implications of our casually homicidal lifeways dealt with so thoroughly as by the poet and visionary Otterstrom, who has been living with his wife in their mountain cabin and without a car for the past 14 years. His is an eye that sees the widest possible ramifications in the smallest observable details, as when he accurately observes that this miniature death tableaux is "reminiscent of familiar images of a more well-known crucifixion."

Most bugs splat unceremoniously into oblivion when they're hit by several thousand pounds of machinery speeding down a highway, leaving us not much to think about except cleaning up the mess, but somehow this magnificent little creature, even after death, has managed to tell us something about the beauty of its existence, and the tragedy of its passing.

Yes, it's just another bug, one of billions lost each day to the unintentional recklessness of human activity.

Yet, perhaps this tiny innocent member of earth's living community has also died for our sins, by our hands, so that we might once again be patiently reminded by Mother Nature of the destructiveness of our way of life.

How many messengers does Nature's Creation need to send us before we finally get the message?"

That's the question, of course, and on the answer hangs the eventual fate not just of our own species, but that of most of the varieties of animal and vegetable life on this planet, which could just as easily continue to travel in its annual orbit around our local star, the sun, as a bare rock as it does an inhabited ecosystem.

Photo and all quotations ©2010 by Jim Otterstrom.