Insights into How to Kill...If You Must

So murder usually isn't my thing. I identify my spirituality most closely with Buddhism, and thus killing of any kind is simply not done because of the damage it does to your Karma. But there comes a time in a person's life where one has to stand up for one's self. Nature shows us that there are many reasons to kill another animal: protection of one's young, self-defense, food, and control of a territory to name a few. My motives, this time, were of a territorial nature. I could not allow the encroachment of the invaders in my space to go any further. I had to take a stand!

My enemy: fruit flies.

At first I allowed them safe passage through my kitchen. It seemed like wasted energy to swat at them.  They were so small and innocuous. Plus, I'm sure I was somehow to blame for their appearance in the first place. I'm not the worst house keeper, but then again I don't always do the dishes the same day...A few weeks went by and instead of disappearing when the trash was taken out or the guinea pig cage was cleaned (like I'd hoped) they remained. Correction, they multiplied. Now, they were not only floating around in the kitchen, but the bathroom, office and dining room as well. I even found a few in my bedroom! When my sweet friend Katy said the words, "Dang, there's more bugs inside than there are outside." I knew I had to do something. With her encouragement and support I took the necessary course of action to reclaim my home from the wee pests. It was us or them. Our tactics were brutal. We used chemical warfare, traps, and brute force, and ultimately won the battle. 

Here are the insights into how to get rid of fruit flies.

1. The trap. 

There are two basic kinds of traps we used last night:

The most simple, but seemingly least effective was the Funnel Trap. Find a glass bottle with a narrow opening at the top. Roll a piece of paper into a cone so that the tip of the cone has a very small opening. Fill the bottle with a sweet, sticky substance (we used a combination of red wine, sugar and fruit). Then, take the paper funnel and wedge it into the opening of the bottle. The flies will be attracted to the substance and figure out how to crawl inside the bottle through the funnel. Once inside the bottle they will have a hard time finding the small opening to get back out again. 

Make sure the funnel is rolled tightly. Ours may have failed due to the  hole being too large. 

The other trap we used was the Bowl Trap. Fill a clear bowl (we actually used some tupperware)  with the same sugary, fruity substance I described above. Cover the top with plastic wrap. It is important that the plastic wrap is taut and that there are no openings around the edges of the bowl. Then, use a fork or toothpick to poke a few holes in the plastic wrap. Again, the flies will be able to get in, but probably not able to get out. These traps work best if left over night in an area where the flies are worst. When I woke up this morning we had trapped about 20-30 enemies and the numbers are still rising as I write the post. 

I used tape to make sure the plastic was stretched tightly over the opening. 

2. The vacuum.

Just attach the hose on any vacuum cleaner and stealthily hunt down the little pests. This can be a nice work out and good for getting aggression out of your system. Katy, enjoyed this tactical post, but became worried when it was time to empty the contents. Make sure you empty the vacuum right after your done, in case any survivors try to crawl back out and regain free range of your home.

3. The Alcohol Spray

This is my personal favorite. Fill a spray bottle with rubbing alcohol and spray away! You can spritz them while flying and watch them drop dead to the floor, or hit a group of them on a wall or table. It's easy and clean and quite a lot of fun (I'm sick, I know...).

4. The Poison

This isn't my favorite, but we had some of this chemical on hand and it seemed like an appropriate course of action given the state of things. Fruit flies can apparently reproduce in things such as drains, so it is a good idea to clean them. My Mom told me that pouring boiling water down your pipes may be just as effective, so if you are squeamish about using chemicals then you could try that. This is what we used: 

5. The Team.

The thing I recommend most is do not try these tactics on your own. It is important to delegate and work as a team with close friends or family. There were five of us at our battle stations last night and what could have been an awful, dirty chore became a night full of laughter and adventure. I guess you could say we put the "laughter" in "slaughter."

In the end, if felt more like a community building activity than bug genocide. So my dears, if you must kill, don't do it alone. I may be a mad woman, but I'm not the only one. As it turns out my friends are a little bit crazy, too. I have learned a lot from this experience (namely that I REALLY want to avoid another fruit fly infestation), but the most important insight that came to me is this: 

"Most of us don't need a psychiatric therapist as much as a friend to be silly with."
~Robert Brault  

Insights into Creation

Good Morning, Friends. Last night during a Dharma talk with a group of Buddhist practitioners the subject of our relationship to the Earth was discussed. I woke up feeling compelled to write about the thoughts the discussion left me with, so here it is. 

If you are like me then you grew up loving the 1992 movie Fern Gully: The Last Rainforest. My interpretation of the movie is that the fairies represent Mother Earth. Apart from us humans she has no voice, but in the film Crysta, a tree fairy, is able to show Zach (a typical American human who doesn't really stop and think about the Earth on a daily basis) that plants and animals and humans and fairies are all connected by the beauty of life and the constant act of Creation. She reminds him of his role in the act of Creation...namely NOT to destroy it.

"Can't you feel its pain?"

Plants and animals can't talk and defend themselves against the reign of terror humankind has brought upon this planet (at least we can't hear them anymore... or better yet, we just aren't listening anymore). Somewhere along the way we forgot that WE are part of everything. You may think that our self-imposed separateness is benign, but i believe it is the root cause of all of our problems: war, global warming, tyranny, injustice, mental illness, etc. Practically every Creation story I've ever heard begins with human beings being crafted from Earthly materials. Look what our own Western Christian mythology says about Our birth:

^{Genesis 7} Then the Lord God formed a man^[c] from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.

We seem to forget that even now the air we breathe comes from the oxygen produced by trees and other plants. God did not stop Creating on the 7th day, he merely rested. The story is not meant to be taken literally. I feel that to take it literally allows us to forget that Creation is a process. It never truly ends. Destruction itself is part of the process. Without death there can be no life. If you disagree with me try surviving without ever taking another bite of meat or eating another plant. Let me know how that works out for you...


I recently  read a book by Robert Wolff called Original Wisdom: Ancient Ways of Knowing. His discoveries while interacting with an Ancient tribe of people in Malaysia reveal that even today there are human beings in existence who haven't forgotten that way of Being. Sadly, they are a dying breed, but what gave me hope is that Wolff and others like him (I include myself in this category) are starting to wake up to the fact that even though we are technologically superior to these people we are not spiritually superior and much can be learned from them. He described their way of interacting with each other, of relating to one another, as deep and intuitive. They not only shared this connection with other people but with everything it seemed. We seem to believe that this way of being, a sort of Native American reverence for Earth and all living things, is part of our past as a species and that it holds no value in our present or our future. I'm here to advocate another way of looking at it. I'm here to beg and plead with my brothers and sisters to take a look around. Are we happy? Are we really as "advanced" as we like to think? If we step off our high horse for just a moment and admit to ourselves that in our mad dash toward progress we forgot the most vital parts of being human we might just be able to turn things around. 

^Genesis 8 Now the Lord God had planted a garden in the east, in Eden; and there he put the man he had formed. ⁹ The Lord God made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground—trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food. In the middle of the garden were the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.¹⁵ The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it. ¹⁶ And the Lord God commanded the man, “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; ¹⁷ but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.” 

God is talking to Adam, and Adam represents ALL humankind. He was warning humankind that if we decide WE know what is good and what is evil we will surely parish as a species. What's good for the fox, is evil for the chicken. What is good for US, is evil for something else. Once we determine that we are capable of determining good from evil it upsets the balance within Creation. Only God has the power to determine what is Good and what is Evil. It is not our place to decide, because we  will naturally only choose what is good for us and thus evil for everything else. 


Put down the fruit, my friends. We don't have to go on acting as if we have the knowledge of what is good and what is evil. That knowledge was never ours to wield. We stole it and became drunk with power because of it. If we stop eating of the fruit and go back to the tree of Life we will once again remember that even though we are the only species with the power to create cities, to go to the Moon, or to split the atom we are still subject to the same laws as every other living thing on this Earth. The law that we have forgotten is simple: everything that lives must also die so that Creation, so that Life, can continue. 

The Insights of Alan Watts

This video compliments my earlier post about Authenticity. Alan Watts is a really fascinating philosopher who has always managed to take complex Eastern themes and put them into Western terms. This video illustrates my point about doing what really matters to you and focusing on how you get to where you are going, rather than the goal or destination itself. I hope you like it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERbvKrH-GC4

Insights into Living an Authentic Life

I have been interested in the concept of Authenticity since I started reading the philosophy of Martin Heidegger my junior year of college. His work inevitably led me to Eastern philosophies such as Zen Buddhism and Taoism. The wisdom in these works is incredible, and at the time I was intellectually drawn to them. I researched, read and discussed, but did literally nothing to change the way I was living. Recently, my choice to neglect my spiritual side has caught up with me and now I find myself actively seeking a more Authentic way of Being, not so I can write a good philosophy paper for a class, but so that I can achieve personal insights and awareness about the true nature of Being. I want to stop feeling so restless and angry and anxious. I want peace and joy in my life and want to spread it to others. My intellectual endeavors have led me to the realization that if these are truly my goals then I must transform my way of seeing the world and act in accordance with my own spirit and mind. So this blog is an attempt to merge my studies with my current practice and to share them with all of you (all 5 or 6 of you who read this...haha....thank you by the way!).

What has stuck with me most about Heidegger's work is his concept of Das Man, or They-Self (I will refer to it as the They-Self because that's how it was presented to me in college). The They-Self is not an individual person, but rather a collective way of knowing. The They-Self prescribes our state-of-mind and determines the possibilities we see open to us. We know the They-Self through social norms and even the conventions of our language. When we are caught up in the They-Self mode of Being we are not freely choosing our own future possibilities. It's as if we are floating along passively allowing decisions to be made for us, without questioning. Take for example the child who asks her mother why people wear shoes.The mother might reply "because that's what people do." This is the They-Self mentality at work. Doing things simply because that's how things are done. I consider our tacit acceptance that we must work at least 5 days a week (or an average of about 40 hours or more per week) in order to somehow earn a little bit of free time (which we call our precious weekends) the work of the They-Self. When did you decide this was a good way to spend most of your time? You could argue and say "well that's just how things are" but that's a non-argument. The real answer is that's how you accept that things are. If enough of us got together and agreed to stop working so much what would happen? Would the world stop turning, or just the world we've gotten used to?

There is always the danger that we may just do the work for the sake of the work. This is where the respect and the love and the devotion come in - that we do it to God, to Christ, and that's why we try to do it as beautifully as possible.

- Mother Theresa

When looked upon in this manner Authenticity is the ability to stop and question the They-Self and decide for oneself whether or not an act is truly meaningful. Let's pretend I was the child who asked about wearing shoes (in a way I am because I used this example in a paper in college). I could press my Mother for better reasons as to why I should wear shoes. She may say "so that you don't cut your feet" or "so that you can avoid callouses." There are plenty of legitimate reasons why wearing shoes is a good idea, and thus I could choose one that suits me Authentically, rather than just accept the answer because that's what one does. Rejecting the They-Self doesn't mean doing everything opposite of the way society does it. It is simply the internal knowledge that your activities are truly your own. That you have thought out the meaning and purpose behind your actions and can honestly tell yourself that you are living in accordance with your own personal values. 

Don't be afraid to stick out in a crowd. Wouldn't this look better if ALL the umbrellas were different colors? I look at this photo and it makes me long for actual diversity in the world. Be the change you want to see ;)

I am in the process of asking more questions like this, but now that I'm 24, married and "independent" from my parents (whatever that means), these questions have gotten more urgent and much harder to answer. I find that through connecting with my spiritual side and listening to my intuitions I'm making choices that lead to more Authentic outcomes. In the past few months alone I have been noticing odd little coincidences that seem to lead me to my next spiritual revelation. I have been paying more attention to my dreams and to odd little encounters with strangers. In doing all of these things I realize how impractical and even illogical it seems at times, but I also recognize that I feel different. I feel lighter and more present. I am taking better care of my relationships and more importantly myself. 


The Buddha once said, "It is better to travel well than to arrive." When I think about how this relates to my life it means that goals and achievements are hollow if we do not get to them Authentically.

Love to everyone. Thanks for reading and please leave comments or share this as you see fit.

Insights into Impermanence

 A few moments ago I was attempting to change the photo in my post about the death of a loved one (my Grandmother) and accidentally deleted it...like forever deleted (or so I thought). At first I sat in my chair staring limply at the screen. Control z. Control z. Nope that didn't work. View blog. Not there...OH NO! It's gone.

I was proud of that piece. It was some of my best, most honest writing and I wanted to keep it so I could go back and relive the memories of losing my Grandma. I don't want to forget the experience and that little bit of writing had the ability to take me back to that place, that frame of mind.

I called to Erich, my techie husband in the hopes that he could do magic and bring it back from the dead. As I was waiting on him I sat and reflected. What am I feeling right now? Upset. Angry. Sad. Impatient. I just wanted him to tell me it was hopeless and get it over with. I jotted down some notes in the little notebook I keep in my purse. I wrote the following:

I think I just forever deleted the beautiful blog I wrote about losing my grandmother titled "Insights into the Death of a Loved One." Perhaps this is some sort of cosmic joke - meant to make me reflect on the importance of impermance. Even now I fight the lump of dread in my throat and try not to stamp my feet like a baby whose lolly was suddenly taken away.

The funny part of this story is that moments after I wrote that Erich in fact did magic. He revived my post! He went to some sort of Google cache and found an intact copy, pasted it into a Word document, promptly kissed my forehead and disappeared into the living room. Sigh. What an odd sense of relief. It wasn't until I let go of the notion of retrieving it that it came back to me...but did I want it to? I almost feel cheated out of a learning experience somehow.

Ultimately I am glad for its return. I hope to read it on the anniversary of my Grandma's death and someday share it with my children. Now that I've almost lost it, I can be sure I won't take it for granted.

So the insight for today is: impermanence isn't necessarily a bad thing. Case in point: my dog just let a monster of a stink bomb. So glad that won't last...

Insights into What the Hell to Do With Myself

"What do you want to do?"

This question came up multiple times today.  Each time it came from a different person and for a different purpose, but the underlying question still remained: What do you really want out of this life?

If you can answer that question without the slightest hesitation, then hat's off to you! How wonderful it must feel to know you are doing what you are meant to do and that you have purpose and satisfaction in your own existence!...BUT, if you're like me, then the answer does come with hesitation. In fact, the answer is never the same. One day you think you know what you want to do with your life, the next you don't.

I have been like that for a long time. Ever since I was a little girl I wanted to be a...VETERNARIAN...no...a PSYCHOLOGIST....no....a PROFESSOR.....no....a TEACHER...and so on and on. I have never decided what I "want to be when I grow up." Until now perhaps.

I have decided I know what it feels like, not what it necessarily looks like. The harder I try to classify or define what it is I'll be doing with my life, the more stressed I become. My future feels out of my control, because the harder I cling to my expectations the more often I am let down. I just want to follow my instincts and my natural abilities. I believe if I make that my priority then I will find a career that makes me happy and allows me harmony in my life.


If you were to ask me now what I'll be doing in 10 years, I can't tell you "running a successful non-profit" or "owning a popular bar and restaurant venue" because I flat out don't know if these things will work out, but what I can tell you is that I'll be doing something that matters to me. That is my newest and biggest priority. 

I hope to set things in motion very soon. In the next few months I hope to extend my concept of family and friendship. I want to live by the mantra "give support, get support." I want to provide an atmosphere (in whatever I'm doing) that allows people to come together as often as possibly and as lovingly as possible. If I can nurture this environment then I can be happy. And if I make happiness my goal, I can not only help others, but make a living doing what I enjoy as well. In a month I'll be relocating and [I hope] my life will never be the same again. Wish me luck would you, please?