Above the coffee table in my living room, a solitary common house fly traces ellipses in the air. He (she) has done this for several days now, frequently and briefly knocked off course by the comings and goings of the people and animals who live with me. There is something oddly comforting in this sometimes erratic circling and something profoundly meditative. This evening I sat and watched for a half hour as patterns of circles and ovals emerged, mesmerized that they most often repeated in a figure eight.
Last night this lonely one briefly tangled with another of its species, but that one seems to have disappeared, as did the large moth attracted to the television's light. Moving as it does, as if searching for something; missing, it appears, its sense of direction. As its insect brain seems to have lost its instinct to eat and reproduce it waits only to die. Still I wonder why it would choose (if a fly indeed chooses anything) to spend its last days circling above my coffee table. Yesterday a part of me was tempted to shorten this final stage but tonight its tenuous hold on life seems rather precious and sacred as I mourn the far more precious and sacred life of my friend, Phyllis Ramirez.
It is oddly comforting to watch the movement of this tiny creature, who when it finally falls to the earth it has come from, will be noticed by the One who created it. If sparrows, then why not common house flies? It occurs to me that in this miniscule organism is all the wisdom of the universe or at least that portion of wisdom that creates both flies and the air that bears them on their little wings. Why else does this creature, with his dying energy, trace the symbolic ellipse of infinity?
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