Willingness: A Writer’s Meditations on Crossing the Flood by Kevin “Mc” McIlvoy

As I was working away, intent on making a presentable,

powerful, sensible, and purposeful lecture, I took a break to walk into a patch of our garden where the balloon flowers needed pinching—this is my life at middle-age when pinching off is an essential life skill—anyway, with the very first quite enjoyable pinch, I was stung on my head and hands by hornets—exquisite and instantaneous fiery pain that gave me an intimate reminder of my own unique ways of responding to what finds me that I never sought. Immediately afterwards I had pleasure in remembering them calling me by name as they attacked: “Mmmmmmack! Mmmmmmmack! Mmmmmack-mmmmmaack-mmmmack!” And I felt pleasure in the wonder of the pain waking up all my senses so that the cold water I ran over my hands felt hot; the water sounded different pouring out of the spigot; it smelled and tasted better, and there was odd, fine pleasure later in learning my marvelous enemy-angel’s name, “white-faced hornets.”

I experienced the beautiful, I experienced the beautiful in the form of a swarm. Kantian philosophy has described it this way: “…the feeling of the beautiful is a reflexive judgment, singular (though it claims universality), immediate, and disinterested. It arises only from one faculty of the soul, that of pleasure and pain, and it takes place on the occasion of a form.”