The Moth Abides

The only solace Ecclesiastes finds is in the daily tasks of eating and drinking and meaningful labor. These are gifts, it says.”

Leave it to a moth to concentrate all the hope and violence of early spring into a package no bigger than a Post-it note.

The other day, it was breezy, unsettled, with black clouds bouncing around the sky. My family and I were eating lunch inside when a moth came along. It found a wall outside it liked and landed. I ran for my camera and shouted to the kids not to approach it until I got a documentation shot.

I need not have worried. It was here to stay. It paid us no mind as we inched forward to hover an arm’s length above it. We admired the graceful arch of its wingtips and coffee-colored stains of its wing pattern. Its thorax was as fuzzy as any of my 4-year-old daughter’s stuffies. It was the omnivorous looper, Sabulodes aegrotata, one of the few moths that can be found here in earliest spring, and just a beauty, fresh and delicate.

Back inside, we kept watching. The wind would come through and peel up its wings and hold them at painful-looking angles, making it clear just how thin they were, more fragile than paper. We felt bad for it, but what could we do? It started to crawl. It turned itself around, put its nose into a corner where two boards meet. That solved the wind issue.

The kids asked why it wasn’t going anywhere, and I surmised that it was waiting for night to get back on the wing. That evening, before we went to bed, we wished it safe travels.

In the morning, it was still there. And the next morning. And the next. The kids run to check on it at all hours of the day.

Listen to a 4-year-old girl’s radio announcer voice: “Moth report. Still there.” It has been five days now, which is maybe a third of its adult life.

So I’ve been thinking about abiding. A slippery thing, the more I think about it, to abide. Like nothing else in life, the kids have taught me patience. They have shown me how movement comes naturally, when it is good and ready, and that you are a fool to try to force it.

My hypotheses for the moth’s behavior, the wind, the cold, the moon — I have to retire them one by one as the moth continues to abide. It’s not going to waste its one fleeting life, I know that. With a pinprick of a brain tuned to a particular world of cues and conditions, it will know fully when it is time.

Most moths are ephemeral beings in their adult forms, living a few days to a few weeks. What we know about the omnivorous looper comes largely from a small flurry of research done in the 1980s in California, when it emerged from caterpillars as an occasional defoliator of avocado orchards. Scientists tested parasitic wasps as biological controls, synthesized their mating pheromone, and reared the moth to understand its life history. One researcher raised 10 generations of omnivorous loopers over two years and found an average adult lifespan of 15 days.

The caterpillars live about twice as long. Whereas many moth caterpillars are specialized feeders, these are known to eat plants from at least 27 families. Many sources cite this wide diet as the origin of its common name, the omnivorous looper, but to me, that would be a misnomer, since omnivorous means it should eat both plants and meat. Then again, the scientist who raised it found greater success by mixing dried beef blood into the diet he invented for it, which he took to be a proxy for the high iron content of avocado leaves. I have my suspicions. With such a wide natural diet, this moth is probably pretty flexible in terms of nutritional needs. One nice thing: It feeds on English ivy.

Moth report. Still there. Abiding is not waiting, nor is it stasis. It is living in the moment, no matter how flawed that moment may be. It is abiding by laws you did not create, continuing without fading or being lost. It’s no guarantee that things will work out. It’s a rough world for moths these days, with the alluring tractor beams of nighttime lights and speeding vehicles and a large-scale loss of native food plants. There is a chance, growing with each wintry day that passes, that this moth will never find its mate and fulfill its adult life. I cannot bring myself to share my worries with the kids.

It’s been a rough world for us on this peninsula. I’ve been thinking about a verse in Ecclesiastes: “One generation passes away, and another generation comes; but the earth abides forever.” I go back and realize how obsessed that book is with how hard it is to find a moral order in life. Everything is meaningless, it says again and again. Laughter is madness. People spend their lives chasing after the wind. And bad things happen to good people. You run out to help your neighbor and get stabbed for your effort.

The only solace Ecclesiastes finds is in the daily tasks of eating and drinking and meaningful labor. These are gifts, it says. There is a time for everything, a season for every activity — that is the famous verse from Ecclesiastes, the one the moth and the kids know by heart. Abiding is refusing to be worked into a frenzy. It is acting appropriately when it is time, peace or no peace.

Like at the end of the film, “The Big Lebowski.” The Dude, slacker hero of the film, meets the narrator at the end, after a plot in which none of the characters know what’s going on, and all of them escalate things violently. The Coen brothers said they wanted to make a film with a hopelessly complex plot that ultimately doesn’t matter. A plot of not abiding.

When the narrator asks the Dude how things are going, he says, after he has just lost one of his best friends, “Well, you know, strikes and gutters, ups and downs.”

As they part, the narrator tells the Dude to take it easy, and says he knows the Dude will. “Yeah, well,” says the Dude, self-deprecating with his arms spread and two beers in one hand. “The Dude abides.”

The narrator turns to the camera and says something that might as well apply to the moth: “The moth abides. I don’t know about you, but I take comfort in that. It’s good knowin’ it’s out there. The moth. Takin’er easy for all us sinners.”