Life is far more strange and even chaotic than we prefer unless we have developed the taste for the strange and chaotic. The ups and downs can be far too strong. I know that part of what drives the civilizing process that is the long history of our race is the demand to control this side of life and render it less. We wish to tame life in other areas as we do in the fields. We are fond of parks, of course and of tamed wilderness, and less fond in the main of the raw experience of wilderness when we are just another creature in it. It is not quite so friendly a place when we think we could end up someone’s dinner, even though through our efforts, that is the main experience they have of us, that we are dangerous and unkind and incessantly grasping and selfish.
Despite our efforts, life erupts as it did for me yesterday in the death of my small part Siamese companion, my familiar since 1991, killed accidentally at my own hand. I am thus rendering the verdict of the four-footeds, a consistent message, that association with the two-footeds is fucking dangerous. That is why so many stay away from us. We think we pay no price for this kind of treatment of the planet and the planet’s children, but we most certainly will.
I have been feeding birds for quite a while now, mainly House, Purple, and Goldfinches. It took most of a year before the winged ones found and trusted the source. My renter in the back yard has also put out food now and is receiving some winged ones. I am not surprised at the slow building of trust and I hope that the winged ones will not assume their welcome extends from our places to others nearby as a matter of course. We humans are often untrustworthy.
I have a friend who declares that his epitaph will be “But he meant well”. That’s about right for some of us. I fear even that lies beyond the aspirations of others on the planet. Perhaps we can rise above ourselves as we go on our ways. It is not enough to wish for better relations with things. We must practice, I think, have the courage to fail and resume immediately if we can our striving.
It may go better if we accept help from our familiars and from each other, not only from God but from God-With-Skin-On, whether the channels are two-footed ones or four-footed.
That's When The Sun
I thought my joy gone,
taken from me as summer
takes spring and fall takes
summer, as drought takes
rain, I thought my joy dried up.
That's when the sun broke
my bones open wide,
light roaring out of my eyes,
when you said to me,
yes.
June 29, 2009 12:45 PM
Sorry to hear about your loss. :( But however it happens, when one door closes or one familiar departs, things will always balance out...
ReplyDeleteI don't think we're untrustworthy creatures, we've just traded certain blessings for others (our languages, for one, in my opinion). Your friend's epitaph sums it up well!
Regardless, that is some kind of poem you've got there... the agony and the ecstasy of being who we are rolled into one.
Thank you for saying this, my friend. I have never had this experience before. The agony of responsibility is quite real for me. The moment that I realized that I had done something abhorrent, irreversible, and then watched her death run, knowing that was what was happening is a dangerous place in my head. It is a pit. I took nineteen years of my life and hers and snuffed it out in a distracted moment.
ReplyDeleteThat is so incredibly unfair and my little one lies in its heart. It is the core of life that we go on from here. There is no excuse not to go on. So that is what I am doing. Pardon me, but I must take some moments, some time along the way to just wail, to seek the balance that just isn't there, to say goodbye, standing at the hole in my soul.