How a Fly Changed My Life

This is bout how a fly changed my life. I guess you take your lessons where you find them.

One morning, a fly got into my bedroom. I didn’t think anything about it. When I left the house, I shut the fly in, because I have cats and if I don’t keep my bedroom door closed, they sleep in my laundry, on the bed, leave cat hair everywhere, and I don’t like it.

When I got home that afternoon, the fly was still in my bedroom. You know how flies get when they’ve been cooped up all day. Bzzz bzzz bump bump bump. But I just changed my clothes and went out and did whatever it was I did that evening.

When it was time for me to go to bed, the fly was still there. Bzzz bzzz bump bump.

Because I’m a Zen student and thus wise and compassionate, I decided to try to get the fly out of my room. Really, I wasn’t acting from compassion, but for myself. I need total darkness and silence in order to fall asleep, and I knew that I wouldn’t be able to sleep with this fly going bzzz bzzz bump bump bump. So I tried to shoo the fly out the door. But before I could close the door, the fly would do 180 degrees and fly back into the room. After about a half a dozen efforts, I, in my infinite wisdom and compassion decided, “the fly must die.”

I went and got a flyswatter, waited for the fly to land, and swatted. Well, I missed by several inches. Then this thought arose, “Oh, I missed on purpose.” Then a crack appeared across my visual field, and this thought arose, “There’s something here I’m not seeing.” Then the crack disappeared and I was just standing there holding a flyswatter hearing the fly go bzzz bzzz bump bump bump.

I thought, “Oh, maybe I’d better not kill this fly.” I went to bed. The fly and I comfortably cohabitated all night.

In the morning, it occurred to me that the fly must be suffering. It had been trapped in this room for over twenty-four hours with nothing to eat or drink. And when it’s August and your whole imperative is to reproduce and there’s nobody there to reproduce with—well. So I got a water glass and caught the fly and took it outside and let it go. I guess I was feeling a little cynical or something, because I was humming “Born Free” a little under my breath as the fly took off.

Of course, I’ve thought a lot about what it is I don’t see and what that crack appeared in, what cracked. A day or so after this happened, I read an excerpt from a book by a Japanese Zen Master named Katagiri Roshi. He says that there is an invisible world; it sees us, but we don’t see it. But it upholds us and our job is to learn to see it. Based on this I decided that reality itself had cracked a little and that an invisible super-reality had almost revealed itself. But I’ve come to think that this is a mistaken idea.

Zen Master Seung Sahn says that if you can break through the wall of yourself, you will become infinite in time and space. What I think happened is that a very small crack appeared in my self, in what we call the “small self,” the ego, the intricately constructed identity, this “Christina.” And what lies beyond that small self, what it is I didn’t actually see but became aware of, is the interconnection of all beings. And I mean that not as a cool idea or as an ideal, but as an absolute fact. We are all connected. That fly and I were—are—connected.

How has this changed my life? The first change showed up a couple of days later. Margaret and I were preparing a picnic, and we had a can of sardines, and I looked at that can, and I thought, “I can’t eat those fish because I don’t know what that would mean.” Ever since then I’ve been pretty much unable to eat meat, not out of any positive conviction—that it’s wrong to eat meat—but out of a sense of doubt: I just don’t know what it means to eat the flesh of other animals.

The second change was actually the more important. I’ve become very aware of flies. And let me tell you, they are aware of us, and they know what we think of them and what our intentions are. So now, whenever I see a fly, I say, “hello there.”

(Dharma Talk given 02/18/00, Manhattan, KS)