For Example

Okay, the broken gull let me lift it from the sand.

Let me fumble it into a box, with the lid  open.

Okay, I put the box into my car and started up the highway

to the place where sometimes, sometimes not, such things can be mended.

The gull at first was quiet.

How everything turns out one way or another, I won't call it good or bad, just one way or another.

Then the  gull lurched from the box and onto the back of the front seat and punched me.

Okay, a little blood slid down.

But we all know, don't we how sometimes things have to feel anger, so as not to be defeated?

I love this world, even in its hard places.

A bird too must love this world, even in its hard places

So, even if the effort may come to nothing, you have to do something.

It was generally speaking, a perfectly beautiful summer morning.

The gull beat the air with its good wing.

I kept my eyes on the road.

I have put thousands of broken birds into boxes, sometimes they have been mended, often not.

I have always wanted to label this state of bird injury and extinction as bad, my anger sometimes fueling my engagement in the overall broken world, and sometimes not.

There are just too many dying birds out there for anger to suffice.

So I awake this morning determined to love the world, even in its hard places, its impossible places.

What is impossible for you to love?

University Hospital, Boston - March 4, 2010

The trees on the hospital lawn

are lush and thriving. They too

are getting the best of care,

like you, and the anonymous many....

...We sit on the lawn together, holding hands

while you tell me: you are better.

How many young men, I wonder

came here, wheeled on cots off the slow trains

from the read and hideous battlefields...

...and how many died

staring at the leaves of the trees...

...tell myself, you are better,

because my life without you would e

a place of parched and broken trees.

Later, walking the corridors down to the street,

I turn and step inside an empty room.

Yesterday someone was here with a gasping face.

Now the bed is made all new,

the machines have been rolled away. The silence

continues, deep and neutral,

as I stand there, loving you.

Poems Vultures and Ghosts in recent days linger in the battlefields of my mind that I pray surrenders to the unnatural divide between death and life. By embracing death, we can love ever the harder.

In my youth I knew not much of human love, or of death. Then I saw the movie, Gone With the Wind where Scarlet is overwhelmed in the Atlanta train stations where thousands of wounded and dying are laid around the tracks. There was my first glimpse of universal and massive human suffering. I saw it from the eyes of a southern raised, white privileged human, in fact, born in Atlanta. Some years later I saw the movie, Showboat, and the universal suffering extended out to those of African descent caught in the web of colonialist harm.

Always, always I connected to nonhuman suffering spending, most of my adult life in veterinary hospitals and field clinics. There, in hospitals, I find, human or non, we all are equal. In death we all are equal. In loving, we all are equal.

What do hospitals tell you of life and death? Of love?

The Rabbit - February 4, 2010

....my hands like fire

to lift him to a last burrow...

...And the day after I've shoveled

the earth over, in a field nearby

I find a small bird's nest lined pale

and silvery and the chicks-

are you listening, death?-warm in the rabbit's fur.

This poem brings to mind a dead rabbit whose warm fur I held against my breast the moment after it died (see below the entry in my other blog: http://liberatingwings.typepad.com/liberating_wings/2009/02/index.html)

I feel the joy that Mary speaks of in this poem when I imagine that death has a reason - it brings life to the chicks here. Death brings life. It is my brother and we are one on this earth. But what of the billion animals dead because of humans keeping cats as pets? What of the devastated earth, parts of it dead? What of Iraq? Is my heart big enough to see that senseless death at the hands of my own fearful, ego centric species brings life? How do we live that open to all that is?

Do you know of a time when a death brought life, perhaps an opening of new ways that enriched this planet? Do you wrestle with a story of death that does not bring meaning or understanding to your existence?

Blog:

In Buddhism a bodhisattva is an enlightened one who stays behind to help others along the path. A few weeks ago a bodhisattva came to me in the form of a dead bunny.

My spouse and I were driving home one night along the dirt road leading up to our house when our headlights caught our neighbor’s cat stalking a cottontail rabbit. The cat started running in full pursuit, the rabbit took of bounding, and the cat was closing the distance. I was torn between getting out of the car and running so as to startle the cat or to tear it from the bunny should he catch him, or getting my spouse to drive the car fast so as to catch up quicker to the chase. I started to yell “gun it, gun it” when I saw the cat catch the bunny and both flip in the air, and my spouse did just that. When the bunny hit the ground, now free from the cat, he came running back towards us right into the wheel of our accelerating car. The bunny died instantly. With my spouse’s head in his hands I gathered up the still, soft bunny and immediately walked back with him cradled in my arms to show our neighbors what their cat had precipitated. Perhaps not the most usual way to meet your neighbors with a dead bunny in you arms, but I had wanted to speak with them for months about their cats hunting birds and mammals on our property.

My neighbor said that these were feral cats that they fed and didn’t allow inside their homes. They had them neutered and vaccinated and were attached to them. I asked her if there was no way they could take them in so they wouldn’t hunt and hurt the other species around, and in our backyard sanctuary. She could not think of any solution.

I cannot think of any solution either. We tried as hard as we could to save the bunny, and it ended up dying because of our choice of gunning the car. If I am to trap the feral cat so it no longer hunts birds and bunnies on our property, what damage might it cause in human relationships and the bond between the neighbors and their feral cats. I have trapped feral cats before, and do not do so lightly, because to do so almost surely means their death as the animal shelters cannot find homes for all these semi-wild felines. So who gets to live? Who gets to die? And who gets to decide? And will our decisions actually do less harm than our lack of decision?

I am greatly humbled with this incident. Even when I think I know the right thing to do, I don’t have all the answers. Life is complex, the answers unfathomable. But the path seems somehow simpler now. The bunny tells me to live the life of compassion, of authenticity, and of heart breaking love that cares for my neighbors, their cats, the birds and bunnies that flourish and fail at our hands, and myself. Somewhere in that engagement a light came to me so that I could more clearly see that though there is suffering all around me, there is also beauty. Out of that clearing of the extraneous, the grace of that bunny’s life and death as I held its soft rabbit feet against my wet cheeks taught me to trust in love and that somehow we’ll find a way to build the beloved community of mixed species. What this means in actual concrete actions I do not know – maybe trapping, maybe more conversations with the neighbors, and most certainly, a watering of the life around me with tears so that love may grow.