The Story of the Book: More Joanne Lauck Interview

Interviewed by Ruth Ann Smalley and David Harrison
 

The story of how Joanne Lauck came to write The Voice of the Infinite in the Small embodies many of the themes in her book— about being guided in life, about the soul finding its unique calling, about the connections between the natural world and the inner life of individual human beings, about the power of archetypal images and of dreams. Here is her answer to the question about how the book came into being.

Ruth: Can you tell us how you came to be interested in the insect-human connection? Why did you think the message of The Voice of the Infinite in the Small was one that needed to be heard?

Joanne Lauck: I think the insects set me up, actually, although I didn’t know it at the time. After I got all done writing the book, I went back to my dream journal and saw that the first dream I ever recorded had insects in it, long before the book was ever conceived. But the official story is that I got the desire to write about the human-animal bond after the death of my mentor, a being-in-fur. Prior to that, I did no writing at all. The desire to write was initiated by a book called Loving the Animals Back, about transformative experiences between people and animals. Synchronistic experiences with a praying mantis and with a moth prompted me to include a chapter designated for the insects.

I was about seventy percent done, and as is my way, I set myself up for something that would help me complete the project. In this case, I went ahead and applied to speak at the San Rafael International Conference on Shamanism and Alternative Healing. Because I am a layperson and don’t know anything about insects in particular, I decided I needed help to write the insect chapter, so I would research and write a presentation about how the native people didn’t have a hierarchy of animals, that the power of an ant would be appropriate in one situation and the power of an eagle in another. We had forgotten the power of the small. I was accepted as a speaker.

As the time approached for me to speak, I started a compost pile for the insects, and dedicated it to them. That’s how I start working with any animal. I try to get in a frame of mind where I respect them and give them a gift of some sort. Insects love compost. A couple of days later, I had a dream in which I squeezed the middle of my forehead where my third eye would be, and a beetle popped out. When I woke up I thought, "This is a good sign. I’ve got something moving in me. I’m getting the attention of the insect world." Four days later, I had another powerful dream. In this dream I was going to be married, but there wasn’t a groom. The wedding was going to be in a beautiful mountain meadow north of San Francisco. I’m walking up the path to the meadow with the wedding party, and there in the middle of the meadow was the altar. On either side, there were elephants as bridesmaids dressed in Sri Lankan garb. The crowd was gathering, and all of a sudden this large body of insects was flying low over the crowd. I was thinking that some well-meaning guest was going to smash them, so I yelled out, “Don’t hurt them! Don’t hurt the insects!” Everybody looks up, and the insects are cicadas, like ones I had photographed when I lived in Texas. A large cicada was carrying a wedge of spice cake. It divided up the cake and gave a sliver to each guest in a communion ritual. I woke up feeling so blessed and honored by this opportunity to speak as truly as I could on behalf of the insect world.

So, all is well, and then I go to the library to do my research. I look up books on insects in the children’s, juvenile and adult sections. What I found were just abuses. I found that even in the scientific and scholarly works they used emotional words like “savage” and “ruthless” and “disgusting.” I thought, Excuse me, what kind of objective reporting is that? Same, obviously, for newspaper reporting. In children’s books, they just set the child up and told them which insects to hate, and that it was okay to kill the insects that you didn’t like. Especially with the official pest species, there was no way a child could feel good after the presentation I had found in the children’s books. At that point, I was at a standstill. I didn’t know what to write. I couldn’t find anything positive. I went and looked up ladybugs. These were supposedly our friends. Well, you know, we’re taking them when they’re hibernating and forty percent, just thousands and thousands of ladybugs, die on the way to nurseries as the “gardener’s friend.” I only found one positive story, which you’ll find in the cockroach chapter, about Jeff Allison, a blind man from Boston who formed a relationship with a Madagascar hissing cockroach. I had a picture of him, and I thought, This is the kind of story I’m looking for. But it was the only one. And here I am two weeks before I have to hand a paper in, and I’m really panicked. I just don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to write.

Now, I’m not much of a mystic. Usually, I close my eyes and fall asleep, and there goes meditating. But I decided to lie down on the floor, trying to be uncomfortable so I’d stay awake, and I just sent out a plea for help — nothing esoteric — just a cry for help. In the next instant, the lights flickered and the room was filled with this powerful energy. It wasn’t just friendly, cutesy energy, but it wasn’t malevolent either. It was incredibly intense and powerful, and I knew that the insects had heard me. As is my way, I fell asleep immediately, and had the dream that set the course for the presentation, from which the book followed.

In this dream, I’m talking to this average Middle America couple in their fifties or sixties, and I’m enthusiastically telling them about the insects, about Jeff Allison and his large cockroaches. They’re just nodding pleasantly, and then the man says, “Just a second. I have to go get something for you.” He comes back with a cardboard box, and he flings open the cover. Inside is a nine-inch-long Madagascar hissing cockroach. My first response was just to gasp because it was so large and alien. He takes it and slaps it on my arm, and it races up to my neck and put its mandibles into my neck and starts to poison me. Obviously, cockroaches can’t do that in real life, but this was more like spider fangs. Anyway, in the next few seconds, as the poisons enter my body, I’m down on the ground in terror, fighting for my life. The couple stands there smiling, pleased with themselves. I’ve got both hands on this insect, and one part of me is just in disbelief that this could be happening to me because of my affection for the insects and for this particular species.

All of sudden, out of the corner of my eye, I see in the next room this shadowy figure, like a Darth Vader, who is at the controls of something. I realize in that instant that this is not a real insect, that this is a mechanical invention controlled by the shadow of the human collective psyche. With that revelation, I’m able to throw the insect off. I realized that what people were afraid of, what they hated, what they sprayed, were not the real insects but imagined insects. People were reacting to the cultural condemnation of the insects, to what they had been taught to fear. Like, if an insect is flying around you, it’s looking to bite you, to harm you, to give you a disease, to take over your garden. I recognized that I couldn’t just go into this Pollyanna about, Oh, let’s be friends with the insects, without revealing the shadow of the human psyche in this regard. I wanted to reveal a blind spot. Everybody just kind of agrees that the only good insect is a dead one. I set out to show how this operates in our culture, how it had become so prevalent that we didn’t even see it, and that we had fooled ourselves into thinking it was a natural thing, when it’s not natural in any way.

When I finally gave the presentation, I got a lot of positive feedback, because what I’m talking about is just common sense. It’s a remembering that we don’t have to be at war with any species. Insects are our relations, and they are here for a reason. The intersections of our lives and theirs can be a blessing. Whenever I would attune to a certain species, especially the official pest species, I read through all the abuse to find the beauty, the wonder, the mystery and, finally, the stories that would bring the people’s view of them back into balance. In the course of doing so, I found out that just as the indigenous people found them to be messengers, I found them to be that also, not just in the environment — and they are certainly messengers of the environment — but also in our psycho-spiritual journeys. Sometimes we recognize them, especially when they come in the form of a butterfly or an insect that we have not been taught to hate or be afraid of. But in their own ways, all insects have the capacity to be messengers. Interestingly, the indigenous people thought that the reason insects were so simply constituted was because the divine could then use them as messengers. They would show up to bless. They would show up to initiate.

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