Boat Across the River
Just another WordPress.com weblogArchive for Animals
She Speaks for the Fish People
Since 1998, I have been eliminating animals from my diet. First I cut out beef, then pork, then poultry. At this point, I only eat fish at my parents’ house because my mom gets a little flustered when she doesn’t know what to make for dinner guests. And I still eat shrimp anywhere. That may be the one animal I never stop eating.
My personal rule for what I eat is that if I couldn’t kill it myself, I shouldn’t be eating it. And I honestly can’t trust someone I don’t know to humanely kill an animal for me. Someone once wisely pointed out that people (falsely) generally think bigger animals are more important than smaller ones. I think he was right, but I still have thought it would be harder for me to kill a larger animal than a smaller one, so that’s how I’ve been eliminating them from my diet.
Last October, I was talking about whether or not I should entirely cut out fish, even at my folks’ place. My daughter was listening in the back seat. A few hours later, she informed me, “The fish people said they don’t want you eating them anymore.”
Well, okay then!
St. Ives
I love these products — soaps and lotions. Paraben and phthalate free, affordable, and most notably no animal testing. I don’t know if PETA would agree or not — gotta’ check that out!
The One Prayer I Remember to Say Every Day
People, Ancestors, Angels, Spirit Guides, Christ, Creator, or whomever is responsible for these things:
Please protect the children today and deliver them from all bad things.
Please protect the animals today and deliver them from thoughtless, neglectful, or hurtful people.
Amen.
Home — Part 2
One of my students brought her small dog to school today. That’s the kind of alternative school where I teach. The kind that is not like military school, but is like…lawless. I overheard her saying that she is getting rid of the dog.
Her mother is a mail carrier and she had promised an older couple that she would take their pit bull if anything should happen to them. Apparently, the man died; ten days later, his wife followed him. Their daughter flagged down the mail carrier and gave her the dog. That dog then proceeded to attack this little guy that my student brought to school, so she is now going to pass it on to someone else. I asked where she got the dog in the first place and she said Craig’s List.
It makes me sad that animals are passed so quickly from family to family — or left at the pound – with little regard to the animal’s feelings. In fact, they are treated as if they have no feelings at all. It’s one of my biggest “pet” peeves; the casual abandonment of domestic animals. I can tend toward preachiness, as I’m sure you’ve discovered if you have read anything else on this blog (sorry!), so I couldn’t resist saying something like, “It’s sad that animals are passed around so much; I’m sure they wonder where home really is…” She ignored me and continued with her other stories. It’s discouraging, but even moreso when I consider that many of my students have been treated the same way. And are treating their own babies this way as well. They are passed around from aunt to grandma to friend…and that’s if they are “lucky” enough to be raised by family at all. I overheard another girl today recounting how she had “beat down” her baby’s daddy’s new girlfriend. She supposedly had the girl on the ground and was beating her head against the ground when the police arrived. I asked her if all that was worth the risk of being separated from her child; that is, being arrested, having assault charges against her, and possibly doing some time somewhere. She responded that it was no big deal because her grandmother has legal rights as well so the baby would not go to his father. Oh, what a relief.
I suppose that feeling wanted is one of our deepest needs.
That, and feeling that we really belong somewhere — that we have someplace we are able, with confidence, to call home.
The Cat People
I try to let my feline companions know that I love them by speaking to them their individual languages of love. For Libby (the boy-cat) that means turning on the water-faucet for him to have a drink or giving him my cereal milk. For Feather, that means giving her a little piece of cheese when she asks. For Petie, it means patting him on the head at 3 AM when he stands by my head purring to wake me up. All five have their own requests that I am bound to honor as they do not necessarily understand the English words, “I love you.” I must tell each of them I love them in the way that each of them will separately understand.
My daughter refers to animals as “the fish people,” the “horse people,” and presumably the “cat people.” And they are not unlike people in their need to be told they are loved. And everyone needs to be told they are loved in different ways. If you care, you take the time to discover how each being needs to be loved and then express that love as such.
Songs: Summer
waves of vibrating sound
crash on a leafy shore;
the insects hug close against
the gold-green trees of summer.
Or they could be thousands
of those rain tubes that you
turn upside down, singing
together in a round.
Tiny weathermen –
seems the louder
they hum, the hotter
it will be. The sound of eternity
breaking from the hot
Earth’s core, gets inside my head
and I hear their mantra
rattling inside everything:
in the air conditioner, the hair dryer
the engine of the car –
I hear them everywhere
they are or are not,
like the way I could see only
shark’s teeth when I closed my eyes,
after searching at the beach.
Can We Wipe Off Love?
When I tell my daughter that I love her, she likes to say, “I’m wiping off all that love!” And she wipes her face off with her hands — she gets a big kick out of it. I tell her in return, “You can’t wipe off that love; that’s stuck to you forever!”
That’s how I imagine so many adults acting with their behavior and choices. The violence that we inflict on each other, the animals, and the earth makes me think that people often do not accept that any kind of divine or universal love should be wasted upon them. Most likely, they did not feel a lot of parental love as children, thus they can’t imagine love on an even greater and unconditional level. They must not feel loved because they certainly don’t act lovingly — or like they know what love is.
I imagine them trying to wipe all the love off their faces with each hurtful act they commit. And I hope that someday, they are in a position to see things more clearly — such as, after their deaths — and that they recognize the pain they have caused, even feel all the pain they have caused. Maybe we’ll all feel all the pain (and love) that we have been responsible for. But I hope that people do not feel the pain that they have caused for eternity. I hope that Divine Love is stuck to all of us forever, and that eventually we’re all grown up enough to feel, accept, and reflect that love back to others.
The Two Owls
I took food over to my grandfather’s house on Memorial Day. My mother takes care of him now that my grandmother has passed on, and Mom is in California visiting my brother. I thought Grandpa might be especially lonely on the holiday and remembering my grandmother. After dinner I was washing dishes at the sink, looking out the window at the wooded land in front of their house. Suddenly, I saw a giant set of wings unfold, so huge was the wingspan that I thought of a prehistoric bird. Startled, I made an exclamation, and my grandfather hurried over excitedly to see. He said he had been seeing the owl around his property lately — most likely a Great Horned Owl.
I could see his human-like face up in a tree, so I went outside, traveling over the sidewalk that passes through the garden still lush from my grandmother’s hand which last touched these plants nearly a year ago. My little daughter followed right on my heels. We wove our way around trees until we were under his tree, looked up at him, and he looked down at us. Our eyes met. My soul trembled. As the great Mary Oliver writes in her poem At Round Pond:
“owl
make your little appearance now
owl dark bird bird of gloom
messenger reminder
of death
that can’t be stopped…
…look down with your
golden eyes how everything
trembles
then settles
from mere incidence into
the lush of meaning.”
Though many argue that animals are merely living their lives without any messages or symbols for us, it was hard for me not to catch my breath, hard for me not to feel that the moment was more meaningful than perhaps it really was. My grandfather had just finished torturing me at dinner, telling me that the reason he will never leave that house for a community of some sort is because then he will not have access to a garage, in which he can turn on his two cars, sit in the red Honda Pilot, and kill himself with the carbon monoxide. He tells me often that he wants to be buried in the Pilot, and he passes it off as a joke, but I have a sneaking suspicion that he says it because his plans for death revolve around the Pilot.
He says he will not leave the house because the house gives him access to his death. But I think the truth is that the house, after all these years, has become his map, and especially as an older person who almost never leaves its doors, it has become his entire landscape. It holds all his stories. To leave it would be to leave himself behind, and that would mean his death. I think it was something like that for my grandmother, too, back when I was in high school, and it seems a common phenomenon for older people who are forced to leave their longtime homes. It reminds me on a much much smaller, much much less tragic scale of the American Indians being forced to leave their sacred homelands. Those lands contained all their stories, so much so that being forced to leave them meant being forced to leave their religion, their entire way of existing, to leave their hearts behind. These things passed through my head as the giant bird’s eyes met mine. And then he flew away.
We walked back into the house until it was time to leave, and when we returned back outside, I could see a smaller owl, still very large. I presumed it was the female, and she did not start away when she saw me approach. She stood her ground confidently up in the tree and made a strange and eery high-pitched whistle. The enormous male was out of sight at this point, but I could hear him whistling back to her. I listened for a few minutes as they called to each other, and again I felt my grandmother’s spirit pass by me. Strangely, I sensed that she was calling to my grandfather. When I got home, I Googled “symbolism of the owl,” and almost immediately read these words: “The Cree Indians believed that the high-pitched whistle of the owl was a summons from the spirit world.” Interesting stuff. And who knows? Maybe true.
