Martina Havlová

 

       




I'm turning over
look out and give me room there
you cricket, you.

/        
   
Borrowing my house
from insects,I slept.
/Kobayashi Issa

Several years ago, I moved out of my hometown of 3 600 of population to a city, 
where I studied and worked, and rented a small, 22-square metre apartment there. 
The place soon turned into home.

One evening I was working on something with the lights on, having all windows wide
open. Suddenly I realized there were no mosquitoes at all which surprised me. There used to be an unwritten rule in our family – before turning the lights on in summer, you had to close all the windows in the house. Otherwise it would get full of mosquitoes.


What seemed like a win-win situation made me feel the other way around. The absence of mosquitoes brought a realization that I was on my own, in a city centre where one could barely hear birds, and where one could easily lose track of seasons because everything was happening very fast and the nature wasn’t at one’s doorstep as it used to be when living back in a small town. 

Later I came across a book of haiku by Kobayashi Issa and it moved me. Issa often writes about animals; especially the ones that we tend to overlook or might even consider pests. In his poems, he speaks to insects, frogs or mice with a sense of kinship, respect and affinity. The animals are fellow inhabitants of the place where he lives, and he sympathizes with them.

Since that, I started to appreciate more even the smallest insects that I would see outside or in the house and look at them as my companions. I would write down lists of the animals I have seen in and from my apartment and think about Issa. 


Animals observation from and within my apartment:
wood pigeon
stock-dove
common kestrel
eurasian nuthatch
bat
great tit
magpie
fly
daddy-longleg
ladybug
leopard moth
rough woodlouse
ant
spider
bee
wasp
moth
butterfly



the story is to be continued.