I crushed an ant a minute ago. It makes me feel very sorry. A minute thing like that. I just felt an itch and I itched and there he was on my finger, and I said to myself, "Sorry, friend."
I try not to kill anything. It is very difficult sometimes. I turn on the shower and they all scurry out from under the sponge and into the pouring water and I think, god, sorry friends. Really.
I sometimes wonder why I even have these tendencies towards extreme compassion in the midst of those who readily dispense bug spray and wash them down the drain and step on them and whatever else. I wonder if the compassion is ill-conceived, if it is really just foolish, that the ants and the other bugs don't experience like we do and don't feel the kind of pain we do. But then I see them squirm and I see them scurry from dangers, which would seem to indicate some sort of aversion to death. And all living things share it.
And this is how I am in the social sphere. This sort of delicate forest of interconnected life that I try so hard not to trample, but to move through you must trample, and it happens, and it is all so painful, I don't understand why I wasn't better equipped to do what everyone else seems OK with doing.
These Libras...I read that they can be over-compassionate and lose themselves and find themselves torn asunder among the others' interests and conflicts. They desire harmony with their surroundings most in life, and perhaps for them the greatest sorrow is to see the failure of this harmony, which is constantly occurring due to the vast number of contradicting interests that cross one's path in life. I am of these Libras. A slice of this cyclical structure they envision as the Zodiac. It is not a literal metaphysical reality, but a beautiful metaphor that may just work in its abstract form.
Perhaps we are born in time and our places in this great machine are defined at birth according to spacial and temporal circumstances and we interlock with the others in specific ways in this unfolding grind and all these sentiments are just the experience of being a part of it.
And what of those who say, "I do not want to be a part of it"? And they die by suicide or broken hearts or they simply leave to live in solitude? What of them? Broken pieces? Further complications of this strange life? I wonder if I could join them (by way of solitude of course), but then I would be useless to a lot of others, and there is so much more to do before that.
Maybe later.
There is always lying drunk on a roof, watching the multi-layered clouds (the highest layer cracked like a dehydrated desert floor), at moments thinking much and then spontaneously thinking of nothing, and then later watching the cars go by. And few, if none of those people ever looked up.
