I am a louse. Not the Elizabethan insult Shakespeare invented. But the bug. That is what I am thinking as I comb through my daughter’s hair looking for eggs. That’s what I have been thinking about a lot lately.

Myself and Maxine and three other families from our school have head lice. I would not be surprised if other families also contracted it. Those kids loved to hug. But who wants to admit they have bugs crawling across their scalp? Most of us are disgusted, panicked even. I can’t trace my unusual calm about our situation to anything in particular. I’d like to think it has something to do with the practices of sufficiency, ease and presence. Because there were certainly a few visits to the tropics when the scuttling, scattering, scurrying sound of bugs scraping on the floor would keep me awake and discourage neeeded nighttime bathroom use.

But we forget that bugs are everywhere, don’t we? That flora lines our gut, that nomadic tribes of bacteria roam our arms, stomach, legs and face, that bugs help alchemize the organic chain of life. Maybe it’s that lice is a parasite. I don’t get anything out of hosting them. They feed; I itch and get ostracized.

Still, I can’t help myself from wondering what it’s like to be a louse. As I part and comb one section, are the mamas hurrying to another area, praying for their eggs’ survival? Do they return eventually to see the damage? Do they mourn as they suffocate during my treatment? I am aware that bugs probably don’t have such complex feelings, and that the evolutionary code is for them to lay more eggs than they expect will live.

But lice need a home too, right?. I wish it weren’t on my head, but I appreciate their plight. I think of a poem by Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Han often and especially when I am struggling with judgment and criticism and righteousness, when I cannot see or even imagine the radical nonseparation and oneness of all beings, when I forget our true nature and the right order of things. Here’s a few phrases:

Please Call Me by My True Names by Thich Nhat Hanh (an excerpt)

I am the mayfly metamorphosing
on the surface of the river.
And I am the bird
that swoops down to swallow the mayfly.

I am the frog swimming happily
in the clear water of a pond.
And I am the grass-snake
that silently feeds itself on the frog.

I am the twelve-year-old girl,
refugee on a small boat,
who throws herself into the ocean
after being raped by a sea pirate.
And I am the pirate,
my heart not yet capable
of seeing and loving.

I think of the pirate. He’s so horrifying in my mind. And, I see the pirate in myself sometimes, in others too. The part of us that takes more than we need, the part that does not give back, the part that plunders what is not ours, who violates another’s rights and has no remorse … The part of us that is so lost and closed by scarcity and fear, we can’t see what we’ve done, the costs of our actions. The louse and the pirate. A couple of my true names.

Having head lice is humbling, and I am doing what I need to do to excoriate it from our house. And having it has helped me have compassion. Compassion for all my parts, the parts that still have not accepted our interdependence, that hierarcherize and categorize to feel safe and clean. And compassion for the lice I will cause to die.

And as I do what it takes to fulfill on my social contract and to relieve my scalp of itch, I also wonder if there is another way – a Buddhist approach perhaps? – where I am not killing off a whole family of tiny, pathetic bugs. It is so easy for me to act inside of convenience, to move towards efficiency – and it becomes clearer and clearer to me that efficiency is the paradigm we are leaving as we enter one of sufficiency. I am reminded of a bumper sticker I once saw that read, “Efficiency = Death”. In this case, that is certainly true.

Share