Trapdoor Spider

The Trapdoor Spider is doubly wise
   Hiding beneath her lid from enemy eyes.
Springing upon her victim with sudden surprise
   Yields her another day of life via ants and flies.

O.

REFERENCES

[image] "Trap-Door Spider" everythingabout.net (Accessed August 12, 2009)

[ * ] A slow-motion capture of a Trap-Door Spider in action.

Contemplating the first, deadly strike

{ Podcast this essay } The discipline of emptying the mind, just before the strike, demands either superb mental control, gained by years of practice; or, it requires merely a very small brain, one that lies empty, devoid of all but the most metabolic of thoughts, one trained to kill without even the distraction of remorse.

[image] Samuel Yung photos.

O.

Professional reapers teach of death

{ Podcast this essay } Have we not all seen death? Death is the fuel that powers life; that event which is fated for all things, and which makes life possible. Death at the small scale is easily overlooked, and thus our stunning upset when macro death -- death of people, of loved ones, even death of the self -- breaks from the horizon of the possible into the probable, and finally into the actual. Small scale death is death, nonetheless. And there are a host of professional reapers just waiting to teach us that single lesson that we must all learn, even if just once.

[image] Samuel Young.

O.

Bee's Nightmare

Sometimes at night, bees worry intensely about whether they shall return from a long tomorrow's work. The hive is well aware that evil creatures alight out there, those that take advantage of supreme beauty, those that hide in plain site only to allow a working drone to carefully draw himself to his own demise.

REFERENCES

[image] t_buchtele, untitled, Uploaded on June 3, 2007 Flickr (Accessed 6/5/2007)

Faith, Experience, and Spiders. (Q & A)

Dear Mr. Supposed Philosopher:

I think the whole notion of posting faith in something after having some esoteric feeling affirms no truth and prevents no problems. What do you think of that?

Signed,

Seeing-Is-Believing


Dear Sense-It-or-It's Senseless:

I can perfectly understand your exasperation with people who make claims about the veracity of their inner experiences as if they were straightforwardly accounts of the way things are, and thus worthy of immediate belief (and subsequent action). However, the person who interprets and acts upon such motives may be doing nothing other than what we all do in the face of everyday ambiguous experiences. I am reminded of the account of a close friend, one whom I love as if he were my very brother, on matters not far from this very issue:

"At 3:30am, one morning, my wife wakes me up and tells me to get out of the bed. Allegedly, and I very much emphasize that term, there is a bug crawling around in it. I am quite certain she is dreaming, but she was pretty panicky, so I went along with her. 5 minutes later, after the entire bed was torn apart, and then carefully put back together, piece by examined piece, I was allowed back in and went back to sleep without incident.

The next morning, when I am in the shower, at the very instant when hot water hits my arse, I feel a slight burning. I explore and discover a heinous welt on my butt cheek, quite obviously a bug bite -- in fact, a spider bite.

My lovely bride had faith in something she could not see, but something she was able to feel. I was unable to have faith in something I could neither see nor feel.

Because of my lack of faith; in the end, I got bit in the ars."

As any good lawyer will tell you, precedent sets how we must interpret past experience, and I can think of no better precedent for explaining the link between inner experience and action that this story.



O.