Jan 10 Friday focus

Back before we had portable screens and streaming media, (cue for old guy music) we played with less sophisticated toys. One of my favourite activities was to  take a jar out and hunt for glow-worms. Yes they are technically a beetle, but I'm not writing a science piece here.

Part of the fun was running around trying to predict in the darkness where they'd next glow next. The other trick was getting new ones in the jar without letting the others you'd already caught get out. On a good night, I'd go home with a jar full with about a dozen of these acting like a weird sort of living night-light in my room. While my friends were content to pull them apart and smear their phosphorescent juice on their faces like war paint. I loved these thing, I wanted to keep them.

I would do anything I could do to make them feel at home in the jar. I would put little caps full of water in there along some grass or maybe even a flower. I had no idea what they ate, but I figured the blades of lawn I had there would do the trick. But as careful as I was with them, I would wake up in the morning to a jar of mostly motionless bug carcasses. It always bothered me, but not apparently enough to stop me putting them in there.

After dealing with my post-mortem angst for one too many times, my mum explained to me that these were wild animals, not meant to be captured and kept. But I had been a good bug dad I insisted. What more did they need?

What they needed to survive was that thing I couldn't give them, that was freedom. They were made to wander, to cast their glow on other kids, in other people’s back gardens, too. The thing I had to come to terms with was they weren't mine. While I could appreciate them, I couldn't possess them for myself. In doing so, the very thing I claimed to love died and was extinguished. 

The urge to hunt them has never completely gone, (admittedly harder to do where I am), but to capture them has. This forty four year old still has a thrill from seeing one on a dark evening. But if I want others to see what thrills me, I have to resist the urge to own it, just rather let other know of the wonder I have seen as well.