The Architecture of the Unseen

My neighbor, Elias, spent three summers trying to evict a colony of wasps from his porch. He saw them as invaders, a threat to his Sunday morning coffee routine. One afternoon, I found him standing perfectly still, watching them work. He wasn’t swatting anymore. He pointed to the way they moved—not with malice, but with a frantic, geometric precision. He realized then that they weren’t there to bother him; they were simply building a city in the rafters, indifferent to his presence. We spend so much of our lives labeling the world as either for us or against us, rarely stopping to consider that most of existence is just busy being itself. There is a profound, quiet dignity in the labor of things that don’t know our names. When we finally stop fighting the small, buzzing complexities of our own backyards, we might find that we are not the masters of our space, but merely guests in a much larger, more intricate home. What have you overlooked lately simply because you were too busy being afraid of it?

Lothar Seifert has captured this delicate, hidden industry in his image titled Hornets in My Garden. It is a reminder that there is a complex world operating right beneath our noses if we only take the time to look. Does this perspective change how you view the wild spaces around your own home?