… our salad was growing.

This spring, I planted nasturtiums in a pot on our back porch hoping for a crop of nice leaves to eat this summer. No sooner did the big beautiful round leaves appear, then cabbage white butterflies started hanging out by the plant. Soon, little holes appeared in some of the big green leaves. Sure enough, on the underside of each hole was a tiny green caterpillar. No problem, I love wildlife! Did I tell you how much I even love common creatures? No creature too humble. The caterpillars were our little friends.

Everyday they got just a bit bigger. They were so juicy looking they were almost translucent: beings halfway between plant and creature. Soon the nasturtium plant was looking less and less, but I hoped our reward would be a bumper crop of chrysalises. Instead, one day the caterpillars suddenly disappeared, leaving a bunch of leafless vines. Did they ditch us to make chrysalises elsewhere? Or do house finches eat them?

Several months ago, I also planted two different Passiflora species with hopes of attracting fritillary butterflies. One of these was a ubiquitous type, which I dug up from a well tended garden, which would gladly be rid of Passiflora forever. This has proven to be a tough and drought tolerant vine. No regrets. But no butterflies yet.

The other was a very fragile and needy looking Passiflora amalocarpa, which I worked hard to win at a lecture on Passifloras by Jorge Ochoa. Passiflora amalocarpa is associated with Heliconius butterflies in its natural range. But I didn’t know if it would attract anything here in Los Angeles. Its beautiful wing-like leaves convinced me to take it home, despite the fact it is neither drought-tolerant nor particularly edible (the criteria we use for our already overpopulated garden).

I’ve been watching the plant carefully, helping it to get established. Only yesterday did Robert find caterpillars on it. Today the plant is almost already defoliated. Now I feel like I’m being forced to choose between keeping the plant alive, or keeping the caterpillars….

Summertime. It’s ant season! This part of town is known for ants. The rest of the year, ants rule. Outside, I mean. They search for plants to colonize and turn them into aphid farms. Factories for sweet honey juice. Who could want more? But this time of the year, the ants attempt to colonize inside as well. They search for water, food, refuge from the heat.

This August it seems just about every surface in the house has a couple ants meandering leisurely over it. The table. The desk. The edge of the bathroom tile. Along the window sill. They crawl up my leg as I sit at the computer. I watch for that moment when a handful of meandering ants turns into a focused line of workers. Then it’s often just a couple hours before the line turns into a frenzy.

When we moved into this house in Northeast Los Angeles, I thought, why not welcome all life forms into our house? Isn’t it the way of enlightened people to cause no harm to any living creature? Rather than kill spiders, ants, and flies, we could have a conversation with them, and understand their habits as deeply as possible. If their needs are met and our needs are met, noone gets killed.

Last week, I watched a couple leisurely wandering ants transform into a purposeful line of workers. They had found a dead fly on the windowsill. Jawful by jawful, the community ate away at the fly until all that remained was a shell of a head flanked by two green compound eyes. I expected the ants to then take over the rest of the house. Instead, within hours, they dissipated without a trace.

Usually, though, instead of dissipating, the swarm increases in size and frenzy. Familiar household objects change in form, their surfaces morphing into an unreadable writhing brown mass of ant-bodies.

At those times, I wonder, is killing one individual ant really causing harm to a living creature? Is not one ant simply an exploratory tentacle for a larger swarm? Is not the human body itself merely an envelope for all sorts of microorganisms, some of which would be dangerous if found in another context? Yet, when working in concert with the rest of the body, these bacteria digest food, and do so many other good things for us, that we could not exist without them? Who is to say that spraying my internet-found ant-control recipe of sweet-smelling essential oils, soap, and water, and then mashing the confused ant bodies that survive the spray; is actually doing harm to a living creature? Despite the hundreds of ant corpses, isn’t the creature– the larger ant colony– so much larger than me? It seems it is they who control me, rather than I who have power over them… If I spray them, can I still be enlightened?