Lessons From a Hornet at Midnight
I was about to go to bed, but then I heard the sound. A loud buzzing over by the window. When I got up to go investigate, I realized quickly that the buzzing was flying towards me, it was huge, and not a fly. It was, in fact, a hornet.
I quickly jumped up and ran to the door of my room, eyeing it, trying to predict its’ next move. I wasn’t expecting this hornet to teach me so much about my current state of emotion and how I’ve been showing up in the world. That’s what insects and animals typically do, anyway. I notice how they move, see how I react. I notice what’s going on. The nature of things.
I don’t have this same reaction to spiders. I love them. In fact, last night, my niece watched in awe as I wiggled a little paper underneath one, put a jar on top of it, and transferred it to the bushes outside. I care about their creativity. I care about their life, even at the possible notion of them biting me.
I’ve never been bitten by a spider. I have been stung by a hornet, multiple times at a soccer game when I was in elementary school.
Hornets are a different story. It’s been half an hour, now, watching this hornet fly around my room, my heart jolting and racing each time it gets up to fly around. I move each time, working to stay far away from it. It was in these moments of shocks of fear as it flew that I had the realization of what the hornet was representing in my life. It even brought a tear to my eye.
You know, I could just leave this room, go focus on something different. I could go sleep upstairs on the couch. I could go watch TV until the hornet flies out of my room. Those are options. But no, I sit here, looking at it. I need to know where it is so it doesn’t hurt me.
My eyes stay locked on the attacker. It flies, and it bumps into walls, and falls to the floor, and I stare at it, eyes wide. I stare at it, hoping it doesn’t come near me. For a second I think, “well, I could be on the offense. I could go upstairs and get the hornet killer.” But anxiety rises when I realize that if I leave the room, I might not know where the hornet goes next. So I stay and look at it from across the room, it staying on the wall above my bed. I know innately that this will not solve the problem, and I wonder if I will stay and look at it all night, unable to move to my bed to sleep out of fear.
It makes me think of the night I couldn’t sleep because of a different attacker. How I laid there, eyes wide, nervous system severely activated, wondering what he was going to do next. That Bri was nothing but fear, at the time.
And then that makes me think of how this, what I’m doing right now, is a trauma response. The intense focus. My energy being pulled to being consumed over this one thing because of the need to feel safe. Using this blog to transmute these high volts of emotion because I don’t know what else to do. How much of this life will I lay paralyzed as I watch the hornet fly around?
And so, how does this story end? How does Bri handle the thing trying to hurt her?
I lit some incense, hoping the hornet would be overwhelmed by the smoke and want to leave the room. How passive of me. It didn’t. It maybe got a little discombobulated, but it stayed on the wall above my bed, not allowing me to sleep. How is this a reflection of my life, hmm?
My incense did, however, wake up my brother, who stumbled downstairs half asleep, wondering if there was a fire. I wasn’t going to ask for help from someone during the dark night, but okay, we’re here now.
“No,” I told him regretfully, “there’s just this hornet…can you please kill this hornet?!”
My sweet brother gets a paper towel, goes to the wall and crushes it with his hand and takes it upstairs in a matter of seconds.
I am learning so much from that Taurus. The easy, simple answers. I sit here and type out my complexity, and see how this whole situation relates to my energy and spiritual process and learning, and he lays peacefully in his bed next to his wife and his dogs just seconds after managing a problem.
Maybe I have spent too much of my life tuning into the next steps and energy of hornets so I can keep myself safe.
Maybe I need to focus on how I can best make use of this moment for me. Maybe I see what joy I can bring myself today.
I’ll do my best to manage the karma, trauma, or problems when they come. Whether that means asking for help, or eventually knowing how to solve something myself. Every insect is different, after all.
“A slander is like a hornet; if you cannot kill it dead at the first blow, better not to strike at it.”
