mating grasshoppers
GRASSHOPPER MEME

In the garden, after a night of heavy rainfall, in the early morning when everything was soggy and clammy, on a branch of vigorously growing Roselle, two mating grasshoppers perched in sunlight drying out and doing their thing, as you can see above

I've always had a special feeling for grasshoppers, and that's good because during these super-lush, mid-rainy-season days they're all over the place. On walks, they thump into my legs, and against the dogs' bellies. Negrita snaps at them, but seldom has any luck.

Somehow I identify with how grasshoppers perch in the sunlight quietly and unmoving, except maybe for their munching mandibles, but when they do move -- jump -- it's spectacular. Their jumps may deposit them somewhere similar to the last place, but also maybe in a puddle of water, or among marauding army ants, or a grassfire, or even something mind-bogglingly good.

Grasshoppers are closely related to katydids, but katydids have a different way of being. They're always examining things with their long, graceful antennae, slowly snooping around like cats, and you hear them at night. Grasshoppers are creatures of bright sunlight and their antennae are shorter, stiffer things, clearly serviceable, but not in the tentative, cautious manner of the katydids'. The grasshopper's protruding forehead is rounded and massive, appropriate for bumping into things. Fact is, compared to katydids, grasshoppers seem a bit cloddish, and maybe a little dumber.

In other words, that's how I feel like I've conducted my life, mostly as a drudge pecking away at this or that modest project, but with occasional leaps into whole new worlds that sometimes turned out OK, or even fantastic, but other times not, and always bumping into things that I should have noticed and avoided.

So, this week I've been thinking about the grasshopper manner of being. During the cogitations I remembered a word that's become more popular in recent years, and which I never heard in my earlier days, the "meme." The New Oxford American Dictionary installed on my Kindle defines a meme as:

"An element of a culture or system of behavior that may be considered to be passed from one individual to another by nongenetic means, esp. imitation."

So, a meme is a feature of humanity, thus it has nothing to do with grasshoppers. Thing is, I'm getting fuzzy about the boundaries between humans and other of Nature's groupings, and also doubtful about the whole idea of one thing passing something to another one thing. For, more and more I'm convinced that everything -- everything -- is just One Thing. Therefore, if memes exist, when they "pass from one individual to another... ," they're really just interior workings of One Thing, like thoughts of the One Thing, and that's what makes sense to me, these memes being thoughts or feelings of the One Thing.

So, I've taken the liberty of deciding that there's a grasshopper meme with cloddish features like those described for it above, as well as a more elegant katydid meme, and dog and Papaya-tree memes, and cloud memes and mineral crystal memes, and Earth and Jupiter memes, and galaxy and molecular-configuration memes, and memes expressed in musical motifs, and mythological and historical and ecosystem themes, and memes expressed in thought-clusters such as general human obsessions and general manners of being...

And within the One Thing these memes pass from one sub-notion of the One Thing -- maybe a single person, maybe a single species, maybe a single mathematical formula -- to other sub-notions, by nongenetic means, just as the definition says. But, the memes I visualize are like ghosts roaming the Universe, and in my world at the moment this ghostly, stumbling, occasionally jumping meme has manifested in grasshoppers and me.

It's been a fine week here thinking about all this, experiencing spectacular afternoon storms, everything so fresh and vibrant, the world humming with contentment, with all its memes interrelating, ever evolving toward higher levels of diversity, integration, and intensity of feeling and meaning.

Oh, and one more thing about the grasshopper meme: At http://www.backyardnature.net/yucatan/locusts.htm we look at locust outbreaks I've experienced here in the Yucatan. Locusts are grasshoppers who experienced some kind of magical change enabling them on a certain day of their lives to flutter into this or that perfect updraft and be lifted higher than any grasshopper's mere jump could carry them, upward and upward spiraling, wings glistening frantic silvery flashes, and then high in the sky there's a communion with a great river of other exalted beings, all drawn toward that perfect meadow somewhere, a place where a grasshopper can live in perfection.

Relatively few grasshopper species ever manage such a transformation, but I think even the lowliest with the stubbiest wings and plumpest bodies must somewhere inside them aspire to merge with the sublime sky-river.