An Etherial Karmic Experience

On my spiritual path, I have learned to value the lives of not only fellow humans, but the lives of all things, great and small. I am sad to say that it wasn’t always that way. There was a time in my life when I considered it justifiable to take the life of things such as bugs, simply because they were a nuisance. Please bear in mind while I tell this story that I have grown spiritually, and no longer feel this way. The experience I’m about to outline should have been for me, a very clear education on the subject, but as I always seem to learn things the hard way, it was not.

This story begins on a small, quaint street in Toledo named Edgar. It is a street situated in a quiet little neighborhood, tucked behind Whitmer High School. My teenage son was but a toddler when we rented this tiny two bedroom one bathroom ranch. It was small, but had everything we needed, including a two and a half car garage, and a very large back yard. In that backyard, there was a little shed. It measured six feet across and six feet wide, perfect for my few garden tools, but not much else. It was late spring, and I had gotten several weeks behind on grass cutting. My lawn tractor didn’t start when I’d tried it early in the season, and I had procrastinated as much as I could until the grass could wait no longer. I was in the garage, working on the mower. I’d cleaned the air filter, and checked the spark plug and battery. The tractor was getting air, and spark, and the vacuum seemed to be adequate enough to draw fuel, but it still was a no go. My next step was to use some ether to try to get it to fire. I sprayed, and turned the key. Success! Sometimes, when using ether as a starting aid, an engine will run until the ether burns off, and then it will die again. This leaves you with the option to try again, and hope it works the second or third time, or you can give up, and continue to further diagnose the problem, often finding fault with the fuel delivery system. The tractor fired right up, and the process worked so well that it continued to run even after the ether had dissipated, and I considered the project a success. Now I needed to put the air filter back in, and the cover back on, and the tractor would be ready for the season.

The garage had sat undisturbed for most of the cold months, and as the tractor sprung to life, so too did anything else that had taken up residence there over the winter. The fact that the mower was now as right as rain was great news to me, but to the bugs in the garage that had moved in, the news was less pleasant. A newly disturbed wasp flew from somewhere in the garage, to very close to the somewhere that I was occupying at the time. In my hand, I still had the can of either, and reflexively, I aimed, and fired. He dropped right out of the sky. He staggered about for a minute, regained his bearings, then flew in my direction again. Fearing his wrath, I shot again, and witnessed the same result. This time however, I did something different. To my fellow sensitive souls hearing this message, I hope you understand again that I am not the same person I was back then, and the end of this story does have me getting my comeuppance, so stay with me. This time, as he fell to the ground, I smashed him. While my treatment was far from kind, it was very effective, the wasp was no more. I marveled for a moment at the ease with which I could now dispatch my aerial enemies, and I recalled the small nest I had seen in the shed earlier in the year.

I turned off the tractor, and walked out to the shed to see if the nest was still there. Not only was it there, but it was much bigger than I remembered. Armed with my can of ether, it was then decided that I would rid my shed of these little terrors, and I set about it right away. Spray spray, smash smash. Right away, I noticed that many of these pests were flying out the door; to get reinforcements I was certain. So, to solve that problem, I closed the door. Spray spray, smash smash, over and over again. I used a flashlight to find a victim, gave a spray, did a smash, and repeated. Spray spray, smash, smash. Now, allow me to set the scene. One, it was hot, very hot, and there was no air moving in the shed whatsoever. Two, The shed was six feet wide, and six feet long, and about seven feet high. That is a grand total of 252 cubic feet of airspace. Spray spray, smash smash. Oh, let me remind you of one more thing, ether is the substance many people in rural settings use before euthanizing a family pet, as it is painless, and one deep breath of it on a rag can make even a large animal fall asleep almost immediately. Spray spray, smash smash. In a six foot by six foot shed. Spray spraaaaaay… I remember the last spray, as it was a somewhat long spray. I missed the mark the first time, and as I chased the winged ninja around the shed, I began to wonder just how long a can of ether lasts.

The next thing I remember was the realization of a pain in my right arm... and shoulder, then my back, followed by my left thigh, and all down my right leg, which as it turned out, I was laying on. As I slowly regained my wits, I realized that I was waking up on the floor of my shed. It would seem that the ratio of clean, breathable air to ether had at some point shifted from the good, to the bad. This left me falling to the floor, completely devoid of all conscious brain function. As my luck would have it, on the way down to the shed floor, to do my best impression of a lifeless heap, I dislodged several garden tools from their hanging pegs on the wall, which of course fell on top of me making it even more difficult to stand up when, in extraordinary pain, I finally regained my wits. In addition, I was also somehow able to strip the shed wall of the nest full of angry winged demons that I had just spent the last few minutes agitating. My newly dazed wasp friends had found the wherewithal to not only regain flight, but also seek, and exact revenge. I know what bees do, and I am grateful for them. While I value all lives, including the lives of those that do me harm, I have no idea what the universal purpose is regarding the life of a wasp. I am however, pretty sure that exacting revenge is in their general job description, as at last count, they got me nearly four to one.

Again, this is a story that I cannot say that I am proud to tell, however, it does comically illustrate just how dense I’ve been in my past to the universe trying to deliver me a message. I had, before this date, taken many bug lives, and I continued to so do for some time after this event. There is yet a second, very specific lesson in my life hand delivered by the universe to me, that I should have learned regarding both ether, and wasps, but that is a story for another time. See also: “The Year I Learned to Build a Barn Wall”.