sophia watches the chipmunks and birds
I saw a possum out the window. Saw another one earlier. I put leftover catfood outside at the end of the day, the possums and coons pass through in the night and have a snack of factory made domestic food. The possums are huge. Both had gray-black hair on their backs with ghostly white spots. One has a big white spot that distinguishes it from the other, and it's bigger than the other one. Both had pure white faces. I don't know that I've ever seen possums this big. Their feet are pink like the palms of our hands. I thought about how vulnerable are the critters of the wild we take for granted. Recalling a scene in Akira Kurosawa's film, Dersu Uzala, the story of a Siberian hunter in northeastern Siberia above China. He meets a Russian surveying team and travels with them as a guide. After a meal, some of the Russians were shooting at a glass bottle swinging from a string. Dersu Uzala stopped them, talked to them about broken glass cuts the feet of the forest people, the animals. He shot the string. Seeing the possum walking, showing the bottoms of his feet as fleshy as my hands and feet, I thought of how careful the possums must be around human habitats. Coons walk on bare hands and feet too.
the movie above, the book below
I've been turning on the light outside above the door at night to give Sophia something to see out the windows. I had not anticipated seeing the coons and possums living their lives unaware they are being surveilled. I hold the three month old kitten and think of how vulnerable is this small life form of bones thinner than pencils, bare feet, dependent on the world of humans. I think of the forest ranger forty years ago telling me God give us dominion over the animals, which he took for the right to kill them. It shocked me when he said this. My interpretation of dominion is responsibility to care for. I took it the mind he was coming from saw dominion as power-over. The mind he was coming from is the world I live in as an outsider with strange ideas about things. Of course, I would think it an ideal world if the norm were the other way around, more in line with my thoughts on the matter. Seems like it would be a nice world to live in where it is the culture to be respectful of living beings and one another, taught from birth, mother's milk.
sofia's morning yoga
It is unrealistic thinking to imagine everybody living by what I think is right, a world to my liking. Sounds kinda like Kim Jong-un of North Korea. It seems more practical to allow everyone his/her right to see it by way of whatever makes the best sense. This is how I feel like it is in what we call freedom. On a subject like the meaning of dominion over animals, we have the freedom to decide for ourselves which way suits us, individually, the best. I get images of three faces in my head, Mike Huckabee, Ted Cruz and old man Cruz, Cuban father of Ted. They come to mind as the most ignorant people in front of the cameras in this time of an abundance of ignorance calling attention to itself. They're a Mt Rushmore in my head, Ben Carson to make the fourth, caricatures of ignorance. American politics makes the evening news a comedy to the rest of the world. The American military killing poor people in defenseless countries provides the aspect of tragedy to the news. Classic entertainment.
I cannot have the world the way I want it to be, and would not want it. It appears to happen when a religion is new that the early devotees live in peace among one another for a span of time. Everything changes. To everything there is a season. When I realize that the only world that matters to me directly, experientially, is the world of my everyday life, the people I interact with, my home, the woods, the meadow, a cat and two donkeys, it's not so big a world. I have some control in my house, in my car. I am happy with my world. I have friends I like to spend time with. We exist in peace. I like seeing people I know by chance in the grocery store. In my world I know people person to person, face to face. The same squirrels, chipmunks and birds partake at the seed distribution station every day. They don't run and fly so far away when I go out the door as they did in the first year of feeding them. They used to run and fly all the way home when I stepped out the door. Now the squirrels sit on a fork in a small tree trunk and watch to see what I'm doing. Chickadees fly to branches just out of reach where they can watch. The chipmunks run, but they're not afraid of the giant anymore. This fulfills me. I don't need to want all the world to have what I have. I'm the only one who wants it. And I've got it. My world is what I want the world to be. No wars, no mind games, no guns, no killing, no fights. I have it. That's enough. Like Mr Rogers, we live in peace and love in my world.
sophia in motion
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