Photos: (Left) A volunteer moss rose bloom, Portulaca grandiflora, in a sidewalk crack. (Right) The same plant a few weeks later, after being carefully removed from the sidewalk crack and transplanted to a landscaping bed.

The Moss Roses

“Do you have any moss roses?”

I hear the voice of an old woman ask from across the garden centre.

“I’m sorry, we’re sold out,” comes the answer. I cannot see the speakers, but their disappointment drifts like a fog over the swaths of petunias and marigolds. The young man in the muddy apron is sweetly apologetic.

“We get one shipment early in the season,” he says. “And they always sell out immediately.” Moans of resignation issue forth from the pair in response.

“We always miss out on the moss roses,” the old women lament to each other, though with no bitterness. They reluctantly examine what is available.

“If only,” I think, “my troubles were so few that I mourned missed flowers.”

Three months later, I come home from shopping. A neighbour, smoking a cigarette on the stoop of my building, points out a delicate white bloom he has noticed in the sidewalk. I squat and look at it closely. “It’s lovely,” he says. I do not recognize the flower. I take a photo and upload it to a plant identification website. Portulaca grandiflora. The moss rose; double-white, specifically.

I hear the regrets of the old women in my mind. This is a gift.

Weeds Are in the Eye of the Beholder

The next day, a different neighbour watches me from his seat on the concrete steps leading to our front door. I look up at him. “This is a volunteer moss rose,” I explain — as if that explains anything at all. He appears confused.

“Oh,” he replies. “I thought you might be growing weeds in your apartment.”

“The old ladies love them,” I continue. He is not listening as I gently wiggle the plant’s root ball from the sandy soil in the sidewalk crack. Afterward, I transplant it into a sunny warm spot in the landscaping bed. Over the following weeks, it rewards my kindness by growing larger and blooming profusely.

No, I am growing weeds outside my apartment.

Growing a Garden

My bookshelf is residence to at least a dozen books on plants and gardening. Several I have had for as long as twenty years. This spring became the year I spontaneously put, “I want to grow a garden someday,” into action.

Starting with a few packets of sunflower seeds and inexpensive trays of annuals, I have gradually overtaken much of the neglected landscaping bed in front of my apartment building. Our beautiful mature trees were destroyed by damage and disease, leaving sun-scorched dirt and thirsty, struggling replacements.

Hauling a 2-gallon watering can back and forth from my apartment like a Medieval peasant, I nurtured an array of colourful, pollinator-friendly flowers. My first round of sunflower seedlings fell to cold and wind, accidental weeding, and rabbits. But a second round of sunflowers, started outdoors in late June, are thriving. The largest of them towers overhead; it is at least 7′ tall.

They should bloom in time for the anniversary of my move to Minnesota.

Nearly all of my neighbours have thanked me for my work at some point in passing. Coming and going, they often find me poking around with my trowel, “Diggie Smalls,” battling the prolific heartleaf four o’clock, or watering in the evenings. Their gratitude and praise are not my motivation, but it is rewarding that something I began doing for my own benefit has radiated outward and improved the quality of life for the people around me as well.

It seems counter-intuitive, but it is often by helping ourselves that we help others the most. Tending to our own garden creates the conditions for love to bloom.

Watching the bumblebees never fails to make me smile.

The Perennial

I find gardening to be an appropriate metaphor for life, generally.

It is seldom glamourous, often repetitive, improved by deliberateness and resilience, and even then does not always produce the results we expect. But even misfortune may not be what it initially seems. The unsightly caterpillar devouring one’s vines will grow into a life-supporting pollinator if given the chance. Waste eventually becomes compost. Death fosters new life.

I admire the practice of tending a few sacrificial plants for “pest” creatures. Balance is not only possible, it is mandatory for living things in an interdependent world to thrive. Humanity is so detached from the natural environment and ever-dwindling wilderness, we have forgotten this. Our ignorance is suicidal.

While there are many variables beyond our control, our gardens are largely a product of what we choose to tend — both as individuals, and collectively. When we are gone, it is the love we shared and the relationships we cultivated that sow seeds for the next generations. Too many have forgotten how to be human.

Perhaps the story of an autist “learning to be human” can help others gain the insight to make that journey as well. I do not know. One can only hope.

I have lived through many droughts and harsh winters. But, like the hardiest of perennials, when the season is right I will always grow back stronger.

Can comic books help save our world? Maybe! It is worth a shot.

Bloom

The release of my new autobiographical project has been delayed due to my work for the Minnesota Comic Book Association (MNCBA), but this is not a complaint.

As of 22 June, I have completed 117 comic drafts, and the first volume is completely scripted. You can read the draft version now by subscribing to my Patreon and viewing the “comics” tag. I also detailed my fifteen-year book release schedule in a post for my subscribers. So in the grand scheme of things, a delay of a few months is not substantial. Things will happen in due time.

It is incredibly exciting to be rebuilding my own brand simultaneously with the MNCBA. I hope that the resurgence of my own comics industry career can benefit the organization as well, like my flower garden for my neighbours.

The world needs cooperation, community, and creativity now more than ever.

Dams and flood-walls must be built against the rising tides of cruelty.

Death is inevitable, but cruelty is a choice. I present to you: the rat.

The nearly 100 year-old building I live in is infested with rats.

Their numbers wax and wane with the seasons, but they are ever-present. The rats were here before me, and the rats will be here after. The sun, the moon, and the stars rise and fall; beneath them — beneath us all — are the rats.

The rats, being rats, do not comprehend that their activities destruct the same building on which we both depend. They do not understand that gnawing on wires could ignite a potentially-suicidal fire. They are unable to perceive the animosity and disgust felt toward them by people. The rats cannot help what they are.

The rats, like all of us, are simply labouring to survive.

Poison

Because the rats primarily remain in the ceiling, floors, and walls, regrettably, poison has proven to be the most effective method of controlling them. The most commonly-available rat poisons are anticoagulants. You may be familiar with the drug Warfarin, which is prescribed to people suffering health conditions caused by blood clots. Anticoagulant rat poisons constitute an overdose of this, or a similar drug, causing the rat to die of internal hemorrhaging; i.e. it bleeds to death.

This is a particularly painful, and sometimes slow, way to die.

Baby Pet Rat “Nutmeg” 7 December 2006

The ethics and necessity of such cruelty are a matter for your own personal morality. I ask only that you remember that the rat is a breathing, living being, as much as you or I. Consider the argument that the end of any life is a process that should be handled with awareness and respect no matter the circumstances.

Try to view the world through the eyes of the rat.

The Dying Rat

I am sitting at the small table in our living room at the end of my day.

While writing notes in preparation for bed, I see movement on the floor in my peripheral vision. I turn, and as my eyes adjust in the low light, the movement repeats. This time, I am able to discern the form of a young rat, perhaps six weeks of age. When I stand suddenly, it is startled, and scurries away.

I rouse Dan, my spouse, to freshly-bait one of two snap-trap tunnels maintained in our kitchen. He places the tunnel near our entryway and retires to sleep. I sit down again and resume my note-writing and planning for the following day.

A few moments later, the movement returns. I turn to face it, silently.

The young rat has reappeared next to the boot tray by our front door. It seems unperturbed by my presence. This is almost always a sign that the rat is being severely affected by illness, poison, dehydration, and/or starvation.

In slow motion, I ease my body up from the chair and inch closer to the ill-fated creature. I squat so close to it that it is barely an arm’s-length away.

Purgatory

For more than an hour, I watch the tiny rat explore the mud mat inside our apartment door. I study the tufts of dust from the baseboards it has collected in its piloerect fur. I notice the pale and withered feet holding it aloft like toothpicks. My eyes follow the sweeping of its whiskers when it stands to sniff the air.

As the rat scavenges along the mud mat, it occasionally stops to sample crumbs of ice melt and salt left from the soles of winter boots. It ignores the ceiling light shining brightly above it. It is unbothered by the slamming of neighbours’ doors down the hall. The rat is consumed to the point of irrationality by its internal distress and discomfort — its hunger, and more urgently, its thirst.

The rat is not self-aware enough to understand that it is dying before its life has even really begun. From its perspective, it is simply labouring to survive.

Entering an almost trance-like state of stillness, I render myself invisible. The young rat’s deteriorated condition leaves it oblivious to me, the predator perched above it. The rat is unable to recognize the external danger it is in. I could cause it great suffering with the snow shovel leaning against the wall, or the steel-toed work boots on my feet. I could easily crush it using heavy books within reach.

These thoughts do not occur to me, just as they do not occur to the rat.

Ghosts

As I watch the young rat, I can feel the ghosts of the many rats I held and loved as pets over the span of a decade in my hands once more. I can feel the softness of their fur, the rapid-fire of their fierce little hearts, and the needle-pricks of their nails. They are licking my fingers with their sand-papery tongues, and gnawing my fingernails, to groom me as if I am one of their own. They accept me.

I blink back tears as grief, fresh and raw as it ever was, surges inside me. I am overwhelmed anew by the powerlessness and loss I experienced when each of my pets died. The only crime the young rat before me has committed was to be born inside an apartment wall instead of an aquarium or cage.

This young rat unwittingly consumed poison deliberately disguised as food by humans. How could it have known? How could it deserve such a fate?

Baby Pet Rat “Nutmeg” 7 December 2006

Upon waking the following morning, the first question I will ask myself is this: Why, in the course of more than an hour, did I not photo or video this creature? But nearly as soon as I ask myself the question, I will immediately understand the answer. I was not there; consequently, I could not have recorded it.

It is an amalgam of anattā and the observer effect in physics.

The Enlightening Rat

While watching the rat, I am not. From the young rat’s perspective, I am an object. I am no different from the hard-shell case of the sewing machine that I eventually sat upon, or the milk crate of massive picture books on the floor.

While watching the rat, so intent I am, that I merge with the rat in its single-mindedness. My identity is dissolved, and along with it, my sense of time.

I become a privileged and unauthorized witness to a private, sacred experience that no one was meant to see. All the inanity and machinations of my human life rescind into nothingness and I watch, with compassion and frustration, this tiny and fragile creature’s world slowly coming to an end. It is humbling.

Death is the end of ego and fear. I am not. The rat is fearless.

Suffering

When I am pulled back into my own body by its urgent calls to sleep, I am left with a dilemma. Do I abandon the rat, attempt to catch and release it, or end its suffering as humanely as possible? Abandoning it there seems unwise.

Eyes swollen from exhaustion and tears, I work to guide the rat into a gallon pitcher laid on its side upon the floor. I theorize I could gently drop the rat into the dumpster, which would not be emptied for a few days. It would likely find food there before expiring, and its poisoned body would not harm any larger creatures that might eat it. The rat does not cooperate with this plan.

After giving up on the pitcher, I abruptly notice the rat slipping into one end of the snap-trap tunnel. As its tail disappears into the darkness, I pick up a piece of cardboard and block the end of the tunnel. I squat close to the trap and listen for evidence of the rat’s activities inside. I can discern faint scratching sounds.

Bracing myself, I wait for the sickening snap! I wait. And I wait.

I imagine the sound of the snap! haunting me for days.

But the snap! does not come. I wait. Nothing.

My dread morphs to confusion.

The Vanishing Rat

When my curiosity can no longer go unsatisfied, I gently carry the piece of cardboard and the snap-trap tunnel outside. I place the tunnel on the smoothly-cut stump of a dead tree. I peer inside the tunnel, cautiously. There are no signs of the rat. I check the other end. Nothing. Both snap-traps remain set.

It is gone. I return to my apartment, carrying the vacant snap-trap tunnel with me. Unlike before, this time the rat does not return. I will not see it again.

The rat’s unquenchable will to survive has spared us both.

I pause to wish it a peaceful transition.

The most logical explanation for what happened is that, like a magician’s slight of hand, the rat was emaciated enough to wriggle past both snap-traps inside the tunnel and escape while my attention was focused on the opposite end.

Pet Rat “Nutmeg” 16 January 2007

However, I prefer to see the rat’s disappearance as a symbol of something profound. I had a choice between behaving cruelly toward the rat out of fear and ignorance, or empathizing with the creature and receiving a glimpse of its inner world. My world is broadened and enriched by these emotional experiences.

I hope seeing the world through my eyes makes yours a little richer, too.

Antidote

We are each given only one lifetime upon this Earth. Life itself is a complex, interdependent system in which we all need each other to thrive. We put our own future in peril when we fail to appreciate and respect the unique contributions all living beings bring to our world — even a brief visitation by a dying rat.

It is a message shared by prophets, philosophers, and sages:

Cruelty is a poison. It may taste filling and sweet when first partaken of, but it will ultimately destroy you from within. Cruel people will always hunger, and they will always thirst, and their appetite for cruelty — once acquired — can never be satiated. Cruelty will bring ruin to life, family, friends, and eventually, society itself. Our world is burning, and human cruelty is fanning the flames.

Compassion and empathy are the antidote to cruelty.

Our ability to care for and empathize with others is an important part of what makes us human. In a world increasingly overtaken by artificial intelligence, the digital, and the inorganic, it is more vital than ever to stay connected to our humanity. Our survival, and the world as we know it, depends on it.

Death is inevitable, but cruelty is a choice. You have a choice.

I pray that in your own life, you will choose wisely.