Tuesday, February 4, 2014

Nature: it's kind of gross really

The "rocky shore" is one of those really "witchy" sorts of places. It's full of life, and potential tools. It's Border Country, places that are ocean one moment and earth the next. It's a spiritual place, for me. But it never fails that I go down to the shore that I am reminded how utterly gross nature can be.

It's not just the weird little insect creatures, or the hideous sand hoppers. It's the slime. Gods, the slime. And the really slippery, manky mud that looks like normal mud but whoops now you're on your arse. Like don't think you can sit down, because everything's covered in mank. No meditating for you on the rocky shore.

I was in the garden the other day, just sitting on the ground throwing a ball for the dog, and I look down and beside me there is a SPIDER. See that's the thing with nature. It looks pretty, and there are big trees and big fluffy animals, but then when you actually go into it it's pretty much just spiders and centipedes and other hideous stuff.

Even us witches who are all about bones and the Wild Wood and darkness and rot and shit like that tend to forget it's not all lovely maggots and leeches, some of it is CENTIPEDES. Fucking centipedes! GOD I HATE THEM. And cockroaches! I don't care if it's inside or outside if I see a cockroach I will get some bug spray and fucking kill that little bastard. 

OK so story time, once I was going to sleep and I saw something moving and it was a cockroach! in my bedside drawer, so I thought "no way I can get it out of there right now" and shut the drawer. Then for good measure, I moved my pillow down the other end of the bed. I went to sleep. At 5am I woke up with a scritching feeling on the juncture of my thigh and my crotch, just at the line of my underwear. IT WAS THE COCKROACH. IT WAS TRYING TO GET INTO MY PANTIES. I mean what if I hadn't been wearing any?! It could have been crawling over my genitals. Maybe INTO my genitals! AND LAID ITS EGGS IN MY VAGINA. 

So basically I hate cockroaches and I will kill them all forever. Meanwhile centipedes are so utterly terrifying that I won't even go near them, and I am convinced spiders want to attack me. When I was 12 of them fell off a tree onto my head and I thought it was a twig so I reached up to brush it out, but it was a spider and it grABBED ONTO MY FINGER. I screamed like the little bitch I was and flailed my hand around and then burst into tears.

So next time you want to go running naked through a green meadow and then fall down into the grass laughing, remember that you could land on a centipede and it might crawl into your hair.

NEXT TIME on Nature Is Gross: parasites that live inside you.