To learn to love flies, you must make annoyance your teacher.
Years ago, on a hot summer afternoon, I was sitting on my front porch when a housefly took a liking to me. I swatted, but it kept returning, landing on my arm, my leg, my face, my knee. I simmered with agitation and eventually retreated inside. Somehow the fly managed to accompany me and continued to circle and alight on my skin. In a moment of rage, I slapped my arm — and the fly upon it. And, amazingly, I got it.
The fly lay on the floor, gossamer wings flattened, delicate legs upturned. I paused in horror. It dawned on me, for the first time, that this was a living being, one that, like me, saw, sensed, breathed and, on some level, wanted to live. I was struck by its lost grace and appalled that I could experience rage strong enough to kill.
Afterward, I felt genuinely curious about these ubiquitous insects, wondering who they were beyond our disdain for them. Perhaps there was something I could learn from examining my own relationship to them.
In my house, backyard and beyond, I observed them more closely. With their transparent wings, filament legs and shimmering bodies, flies began to take on a strange beauty. About 125,000 species have been described. Some migrate long distances — they have even been discovered far out at sea — and many pollinate crops and flowers that humans care about. The males of some species serenade their mates with complex songs made by vibrating wings.
It dawned on me, for the first time, that this was a living being, one that, like me, saw, sensed, breathed and, on some level, wanted to live.
Last year, while researching a children’s book on what we can learn from wildlife, I interviewed Michael Dickinson, a fly biologist at Caltech, who opened my eyes to flies’ almost miraculous nature. Dickinson, who studies their movement patterns, told me that they have the most sophisticated flight of any creature on the planet. Some beat their wings as fast as 1,000 times per second, and they have some of the most powerful muscle tissue, ounce for ounce, of any organism on Earth.
Much of their acrobatic prowess comes from their halteres, pronounced like tall deer — unique, lollipop-like structures that sprout from their backs and evolved from a second set of wings. They function like gyroscopes and metronomes, helping flies keep time as they flap, stay balanced and sense where they are in space. In mere milliseconds — faster than a human eyeblink — a fly can change direction by 90 or even 120 degrees. And their vision is at least 10 times faster than ours; to them, a movie would resemble a slideshow. Flies have some of the powers — like flight and extraordinary vision — that we vest in superheroes. Why don’t we respect them more?
Our relationship with these buzzy insects has often been conflicted: Flies carry disease, contaminate food, sometimes bite, and tend to make sound in frequencies we find irksome. Across many cultures, they symbolize death and decay; European Renaissance artists incorporated them into paintings as eerie reminders of the transience of life. But not all cultures revile them. Ancient Egyptians associated flies with courage, and soldiers received necklaces depicting flies as recognition for valor in battle. According to some Diné storytelling traditions, Big Fly, or Do’tsoh, serves as a mentor to supernatural beings and mortals and a benevolent messenger between worlds.
The more I’ve learned, the more I embrace a live-and-let-live attitude toward flies. I try not to let them land on my food or bite me; I gently brush them off my skin, but otherwise we peacefully coexist. Flies are an important part of the whole: They offer their service in the form of pollination, pest control and decomposition. As unpleasant as it may be, we can’t do without decay.
Over time, an even more unexpected shift in my thinking emerged: I began to wonder what my relationship to flies could show me about my own mind.
I spend a lot of hours practicing meditation outdoors in the mountains near my home in southwest Colorado. When you sit still for long periods in the wilderness, you become part of the landscape, just another rock or tree. Deer come up beside you to graze; mice forage nearby. Birds no longer fear you, and bugs land on you with abandon.
Last summer, on one particularly warm day in northern New Mexico, I sat meditating and counted eight flies crawling on me all at once. Swatting was pointless — they just kept coming. I knew they wouldn’t bite and I wasn’t worried about disease, but the tickling sensations were almost unbearable. I dripped sweat in the windless heat. But the longer I sat unmoving, the more I realized my irritation was just a perspective.
Over time, an even more unexpected shift in my thinking emerged: I began to wonder what my relationship to flies could show me about my own mind.
To the flies, I was simply another patch of earth. The land doesn’t flinch and complain when a fly lands on it. I surrendered and felt myself dissolving into the land itself. A sense of effortless belonging arose when I quit pushing away the natural world — the beautiful and the ugly; pleasant and unpleasant; the flies, flowers, sun and breeze. I was learning patience: Raging against flies would accomplish nothing but disturbance within my own mind.
Last year, a study documented a 72.4% decline in insect populations between 2004 and 2024 in a meadow not far from my home. It’s more important than ever to understand all parts of the natural world, even the unpleasant ones. Maybe it’s even more imperative not to vilify any part of nature.
Not only is there so much we don’t know about the natural world; there’s so much we don’t know about ourselves. As I finished this story in a coffeeshop, a single fly crawled up a windowpane. No one noticed but me. I didn’t feel disgust or irritation, just a sense of peaceful coexistence, even wonder. It turns out that dwelling in respect rather than rage is a much more enjoyable way to live — for me and, I imagine, for those around me, too, including these masters of decay and flight.
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This article appeared in the April 2026 print edition of the magazine with the headline “The unsung beauty of flies.”
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