"One should pay attention to even the smallest of living creatures for these too may have a valuable lesson to teach us, and even the smallest ant may wish to communicate to people," Black Elk once noted. Yet unlike shamans and Native Americans, most of us have excluded insects as candidates for being our guardians, ancestors, teachers, or healers. Joanne Elizabeth Lauck, an environmental educator, presents a depressing picture of our current war against insects — all six-, eight-, and multi-legged creeping and flying creatures. Our adversarial interactions with them are colored by habitual enmity, fear, and disgust. Whatever we find to be gross, monstrous, parasitic, and chaotic in ourselves, we seem to project onto insects. Our control management orientation toward the world enables us to eradicate them as quickly and efficiently as possible.
Lauck, a fine interspecies communicator, shares many stories and spiritual practices that can promote harmonious relations between human beings and insects. There are chapters on flies, mosquitoes, beetles, butterflies, ants, bees, spiders, and the dreaded cockroach. This incredible paperback will enable you to practice respect, empathy, and compassion toward these fellow creatures in the animal kingdom.
