The Moth and the Mirror

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The van sat on a grassy corner of wild coastal Coorong in the lower part of South Australia. I had been driving for a long time after a powerful evolutionary experience at Confest. The evening was still. I had previously ventured over the dunes to sit with the seemingly endless expanse of coast and was now feeling tired.

I lay my head down on the pillow and felt my waking life slowly fade away.

Vehemently, my awareness returned to a fluttering noise in my left ear. I felt something entering my ear canal, it was loud. My eyes shot open in the dark as the sensation of a creature tunnelling through my ear bore me to full wakefulness. It felt like a moth, soft wings, erratic movement, and as it was by now, deep in my ear, thunderous.

My finger reached the ear and felt nothing it could grasp. The sound of the moth was like an amplified microphone in somebody’s pocket as they moved about. What could I do? I thought frantically. Moths are attracted to light. Came another thought, so I turned the light on and faced my ear towards it in effort to coax the little creature out.

The rustling movement continued, and the moth showed no signs of evacuation.

I held my nose to inflate my sinuses. This only served to disturb the moth further.  I wiggled my finger around my ear, slight relief from the constant tickling sensation, but no solution for my (our) predicament. In my mind, I showed my frustration toward the insect and tried to tell it that this is not a place for your home. This obviously did not work.

There was some phone service so a google search for how to get an insect out of your ear returned with:

Warm oil or water in the ear canal will allow the insect to float out

I tried this with a syringe and some water. The moth’s movement became extra frantic as it was submersed. I sincerely hoped that it would just find its way out but as I filled my ear again and again all that resulted was more noise and movement. After a while, the motion slowed as to what I assumed were the death throes of the creature. The muffled rustling became less frequent to the point where it moved only once every ten seconds.

The water trickled from my ear as I tipped my head the other way. Nothing came out. The movements inside my ear were sporadic. I came to a point of acceptance and decided to go back to sleep and deal with it in the morning. My head hit the pillow, the moth moved every so often, but enough for me to relax and let my consciousness drift off.

BANG!

I awoke with a startle. I had barely fallen asleep.

BANG!

This was coming from inside the van. Along with the sudden small explosions came a hissing and crackling sound. My only thought was maybe a gas bottle was breaking. The hissing continued and I hit the lights.

I jumped out of bed and moved to the front of the van. Another crack and I saw the mirror, or more truthfully, I saw myself breaking into many different parts. As I watched, a big split came right up the middle and punctuated the noisy hissing glass drama. Silence. Nothing more.

Tired, I looked at the mirror and accepted that I could do nothing to change either of these profound occurrences, so I went back to bed with a rustling sound in my ear, and slept immediately.

The next day I taped the cracks in the full-length mirror and thought about where to get another. The moth had gone or died. My ear canal was clear. I accepted the transience of experience and decided on what to do next.

A replacement mirror matching the one that had just exploded was available at a hardware store. I purchased it, then found a camp in the afternoon to undertake the transition.

The old mirror was stuck on with a profuse amount of liquid nails. It did not come off easily. I tried a scraper, a screwdriver, a demolition tool. I finally found that the most efficient way to remove the old mirror was to repeatedly hit the screen with a hammer, in every place. The floor of the van was covered with millions of broken shards of glass as the heavy tool destroyed the old to make way for the new.

Next was to remove the liquid nails. I felt like a stone mason, one gloved hand on the scraper with the other using the hammer to bash the lever under each inch of hardened glue.

Hours passed.

Eventually, the frame was clear. I shovelled piles of glass into a garden bag and meticulously inspected my bed, clothing, and hair for remaining shards.

Still sweating from the activity, I applied new glue to the frame, much less glue, and stuck the new mirror in place. Perfect.

I sat on the side of my bed and rested. A wave of clarity washed over me. An absence of thought and distraction. My eyes were open, they took in colours and shapes devoid of symbolic intelligence. There was no mind. I felt new, in a clear light of ecstatic peace.

This mirror somehow, represented on the physical plane, the internal changes in my being. After a powerful time at Confest and the beginning of a journey into the desert, the old me disintegrated and was replaced by a clearer consciousness.

I do notice differences in myself. My heart is more open and spacious. I feel more free to change and motion, more in tune with the environment. I feel I AM the environment, the wind, the trees, the rocks, the earth, the entire universe.

And this is just the beginning.