In the previous summer, a huge paper-wasp nest arose beneath an upper-story neighbor’s window. The landlord hired an exterminator to destroy it. He used poisons and physical tools to kill the wasps and tear the nest apart.

The next spring, at the time when the over-wintering wasp queens emerge from hibernation, I encountered on the understructure of the porch stairs, a wasp queen who was dying. It may be that she belonged to the hive of the previous summer, and had escaped immediate death by entering hibernation. She was ragged, and appeared poisoned. I knew immediately that she was dying and I felt profound concern, compassion, sadness and sorrow at her predicament. I reached out to her… with my interiority… but nothing could have prepared me for what then took place inside me…

Suddenly, my familiar identity disappeared, and so did my experience of the ‘external world’. I was internally transported into immediacy. As if I ‘became’ the entire evolutionary history of the wasps. I saw their origins in nature, and ‘observed from within’ the incredible heroism, despair, and catastrophe of their lineage in life on Earth. I »was the wasp people, learning, dealing with predators and natural disasters (meteor strikes, fires, floods). And I felt the pride and shining spirit of their endless generations.

I experienced Queen combat (over millennia) as though I were the insects thus engaged. Millions of years passed in an instant, and I knew these creatures as my own being, body, mind and heart. Incredible scenes of heroic self-sacrifice and arduous nest-making filled my awareness to overflowing… and these histories became my histories. I saw the advent of the humans… and their horrifying introductions of poisons and destruction… but I also saw humans relating intelligently with wasps… and becoming their companions in life.

The scope of the spectacle rendered all human ideas insignificant… if not »disposable. I was, for those few instants, outside of linear time… existing as the entire tree of the wasp-people’s experiences, dreams, urgencies, and devastations. And this, I knew, was Holy.

When I ‘came back into myself’ I was completely overcome. I was crying out in my heart and soul… and my face was awash with tears. Nothing resembling this had ever happened to me, and I held it sacred.

Later, a few years later… I would have a not dissimilar experience… but it would be with a nonhuman intelligence… and it would last for nine months…