The Moths Came Back

Here's what I did next.

An Audio version of this essay is available below (The dogs and the traffic were enthusiastic participants! :)

Photo by Michael Jerrard on Unsplash

I was just passing by when I noticed its slim, pale form, almost blending with the white wall. 

One moth, right there, above the dresser. 

I had stopped looking for them.

I held my breath for a second, then released.

I looked to see if there were others, though I knew that one was always more than one.

“Okay,” I said to the moth. “I know what to do. Thank you.”

I got the glass and the piece of paper, let the moth know I’d be taking it outside, and into the glass it went. 

As soon as I released the moth outside, I went into the bedroom.

I tried to remember the instructions exactly as I had received them.

Deep breaths. 

Feel into the energy of the world. 

What can I sense? What can I name?

What am I internalizing? What am I believing is my own? 

Release it. 

Come back to myself. 

My energy. 

My center.

I did a visualization until I felt the shift.

A moment of arrival into my body, clear as day.

It’s funny to think I didn’t notice it before—how I hadn’t been in my center. 

It can feel so “normal” to be out of alignment, to be a sponge for the dominant energy currents in which we swim.

I hadn’t been checking in with myself like this regularly, so I should have known the moths would return.

When the moths first arrived, I was deep in caretaking mode, and though I didn’t know it then, I was about to head into an even more intense caretaking period. I was in my head a lot. I was binging on self-doubt. I was struggling to feel like my time was my own. I wasn’t sleeping much, and I fought a feeling of “caving in on myself.”

When the moths first appeared, they were just in my closet, no other closets in the house. Every time I walked by my closet I would see one, or two, or three slim shadows against the wall.

I did not connect psychically with them. I don’t really know why I resisted. Sometimes I need to muddle through the old ways before I remember that there is another way.

Instead, I looked things up on the internet. 

And I stubbornly tried to figure things out with my brain. 

I was doing the human thing—I was making the moths mean something. 

I was making them fit them into the well-worn stories that I had about myself.

Surely their presence must mean I’m doing something wrong.

If I had only cleaned better. But I had cleaned just fine.

If I had only weeded more things out when we moved from Pittsburgh into this house. But I actually weeded out a lot. 

Something about me must be wrong, or gross, or dirty.

But I knew this wasn't true.

The stories I told myself about the moths’ arrival made me feel a deep sense of overwhelm and paralysis. 

Would the moths take over everything? Would I ever be free of them? Would I have to keep adding more and more physical labor to my already full plate? Would life become an endless monitoring of my stuff to make sure the infestation didn’t keep growing? 

My stories also shaped my actions.

If I interpreted the moths as harbingers of judgment, infestation, invasion, failure, overwhelm, grossness—whatever it was, then it was easy to see them as things, as symbols, or as inanimate carriers of meaning, rather than sentient beings.

Seeing the moths as objects in a human-centered story created a distance between them and me, casting them in the role of invaders taking over “my stuff.”

This narrative not only made it easier to kill them, but it made it necessary to kill them, in order to protect what is “mine” and secure the boundaries between “inside” and “outside.”

The story required killing the moths to preserve a sense of safety, and of course, a feeling of control. 

I had to kill the moths—didn’t I? It was crazy to think I could just ask them to leave, or find another solution with the moths. The stories we humans tell ourselves about who our enemies are, and how to stay safe—and the fear that these stories generate—are powerful, and they run deep. 

Even after years of communicating with non-human beings, I too, am susceptible to fear, and it can sometimes take me a moment to reorient myself to everything I have learned from the animal and insect world.

I tried to find humane ways to capture and release the moths, but all I could find were inhumane glue traps that I would never use on anyone. There are whole industries centered around our fear of being invaded. Glue traps for moths were cheap and aplenty, and I couldn’t do it.

In what was probably a pretty whiny voice, I asked the moths to leave. I wasn’t behind my request, though. It was permission-asking disguised as boundary-setting. 

The moths didn’t leave.

I was talking to the moths, but I wasn’t listening.

I killed them quickly with a tissue, apologizing. 

I washed all my clothes in hot water. I laid them on a bed in another room. I slowly took everything out from the closet and either washed it, or put it in the freezer for a few days. 

Then my Dad got very sick and I was driving back and forth between here and there, taking care of my senior dog Max, and then my Dad. It was an intensely stressful time. 

The contents of my closet remained spread in pieces throughout the house.

I felt increasingly scattered.

My friend Jodie came to help me. She kept me company and washed dishes and offered to help me with the closet. I was in tears at her offer. Before we cleaned the dresser drawers, the floorboards, the ceiling, the floor corners, I knew I needed to connect with the moths first. 

For some reason I needed Jodie sitting at my table for me to finally tend to the nagging feeling that had been following me around.

I sometimes describe intuition that way—like a feeling of being nagged or chased. Especially when something in me is working so hard to avoid it.

Why is this? Why do we avoid our intuition? It’s such a strange thing—to avoid something that is so deeply a part of us, and which contains the answers we are looking for in all these other, external ways. 

Maybe it’s the stubborn habit of unconsciously sabotaging myself. Or the years of not recognizing the signs of my intuition or valuing it. Or maybe it’s some deep conditioning that says, “I don’t want to wake up!” Or it’s the comfort in the known, even when the known isn’t comfortable. 

Or maybe it’s an attachment to feeling powerless. Or that tricky need to belong, which can keep us aligned with the status quo, the learned way that tells us we need to buy traps and poisons to keep our house and stuff “safe” and “clean.” 

Because to pay attention to our intuition, to heed that nagging, tugging feeling, might mean acting against the grain, and there could be consequences we can’t predict. 

It might mean standing up for an uncommon viewpoint, something other people think is “crazy.” 

It might mean standing up to the voices in our heads that say, What if I’m making this up? How can I have a conversation with a moth, and how can doing a visualization, instead of killing them, actually work to “get rid of them?” 

What if I didn’t kill the moths and they took over the house, and it was all my fault? 

It’s not easy to step outside of the “normal” paradigms that shape how we relate to insects and wildlife. Paradigms that teach us to protect what is “human” by shutting down the parts of us that are actually the most beautifully human—our capacity for compassion for all living beings, and our intuitive nature that knows the interconnectedness of all life, and the illusion of “us” vs. “them.”

It was this truth that was chasing me, not some harsh judgment about what I had done wrong to deserve to be “invaded.” 

I looked at Jodie and took a few breaths. Then I connected psychically with the moths and did what I’ve learned how to do: I let go of my stories, my fears, my interpretations. I entered the receptive state, and I allowed the moths to communicate with me in whatever ways they chose.

Right away the moths gave me an energetic experience—I was overcome by a scattered feeling, and the sensation of being surrounded by a chaotic, swirling energy. I heard the flutter of wings, and I felt movement brush against my ears. 

I received a knowing that the chaos-feeling was the current energy of the world, and that I walked around thinking that this energy was mine. The moths showed me how I was internalizing external energy and allowing it to control me. I received an image of myself as completely transparent, having no boundaries between me and the energy of the world.

I asked the moths how I could change this. They showed me how to sit and tune into the energy of the world, to witness that energy from an internal quiet place, and then release it. 

All of this made sense to me, though it was not what I had expected. 

Communicating with insects and animals rarely ever is. 

I thanked the moths. Then I asked, “But what do I need to do to get you to leave my closet?”

I heard very clearly, “Tell us to go, and clean the space. You won’t need any poison. But we’ll come back as reminders when you need us. When you’re allowing yourself to be infiltrated by the world’s energy.” 

I also heard, “We can actually really live together. We’ll appear, then we won’t appear. We might eat some clothes, but we won’t eat all of them. Just focus on the lesson.” 

The moths were telling me that I probably would never “get rid of them” completely, but hearing this didn’t feel hopeless or overwhelming. Connecting with them shifted my energy dramatically and snapped me out of my stories of powerlessness.

I wasn’t afraid anymore.

I took the few items I really didn’t want to be eaten, and I put them in a cedar trunk. I loosened my grip on the other clothes. We could all live together, as long as I kept coming back to my center. I felt the truth of what the moths were communicating to me, and I felt the falseness of my previous fear.

I had already learned from animals and insects over the years how they can “read” us instantaneously. They can sense our energy, and they can also fully “know” us in a way that we humans can’t know them. 

The moths felt my energy and knew what I had been struggling with. They also knew that my overwhelm and fear were getting in the way of me remembering who I really am, and what I’m here, in this lifetime, to do. 

The moths had chosen my closet, with their own free will, to help me.

The moths weren’t “invaders”; they were teachers. 

“Invading” my closet was how they got my attention and helped me recognize that I had boundary work to do—with them, but not about them. 

I knew that if they were to return, I wouldn’t spiral out in the same way I had before. I would listen this time.

I would check in with myself and my energy.

And I would not let fear overtake my respect for these sacred teachers, who chose to come work with me, to help me evolve, and to help me reconnect with my center, my humanness, and the courage to stand behind an uncommon view.

Photo by sahil muhammed on Unsplash