Pondering: Lessons from the Great Blue Heron

Photo from http://www.freeclipartnow.com/animals/birds/herons/Great-Blue-Heron.jpg.html

The great blue heron embodied my every longing.

Unconcerned by that which engulfed him, he swept quickly and with ease over the water, readying himself to land wherever he felt so drawn. As I marveled over nature’s artistry and the beauty of his feathers, I felt the sudden urge to memorize everything about this creature with whose presence I’d been graced. But alas, I could only watch with awe and wish so acutely that time would stand still, even if only for this one limited eternity in my ever more feverish life, with him the teacher, and me the student.

Indeed, the great blue heron embodied my every longing, and though the moment passed by as all moments do, I find myself sitting now and thinking, so resoundingly, “The world does have wonder after all.”

Daily Pondering

“Animals do speak, but very few people know how to listen.”

A calf raised for veal (Image from https://www.flickr.com/photos/sandi1214/2131871828)

I write here about this statement because it is perhaps the very essence of the conflict between humans and animals. It seems even revelatory when initially read due to our longstanding acceptance that a lack of speech can be equated with a lack of ability to express one’s nuanced thoughts, feelings, and experiences. The statement however, upon further consideration, is not particularly surprising or groundbreaking insofar as it only acknowledges what we must admit to be true, namely that animal exploiters are largely anthropocentric, and thus prone to such misconceptions as the common one contending that animals cannot communicate with us. But how faulty this is. In eyes, in whimpers, in growls, in stares, in touch, in silence, animals tell us all that we need to know. Will we listen? The answer to that question, it can be guaranteed, will partially determine whether we are benevolent, or whether we have chosen the side of ill dispositions.

The haunting reality that is veal farms (Image from https://rantingsfromavirtualsoapbox.wordpress.com/2014/07/30/veal-crates-and-plastic-hutches/)

On Explanations

We must continue to hope that one day our animal friends may know what it means to be free.

As I packed my final boxes one Monday afternoon, preparing for my move from a summer in Brooklyn back to college in the Berkshires, a friend and I conversed over the matter of the determination of advocates and activists. How is it that one person feels the urgency of a cause so deeply, and is thus compelled to live their life in pursuit of the rectification of that one single wrong, while another person turns away and cares little to naught about the very same evil?

Stephen King once wrote that, “the battle between good and evil is endlessly fascinating because we are participants every day.” This, I believe, does also beg the question at hand: What ultimately destines us to one or the other side in this epic battle? Is it a cosmic force, chance, a deliberate choice, a compulsion, or something altogether distinct from any of these?

Who truly knows the answer to this question? I have searched in vain for quite awhile now. Tired of the absence of any substantive, satisfying, or at all convincing answer, we began musing on the array of possibilities that nevertheless must exist. That’s when it came to me.

Perhaps those who speak for animals, when so many others remain silent among the animals’ harrowing reality, perhaps these individuals speak because they know. Maybe it could be that there is a memory in their soul from a life they used to know, a life of their past. Maybe those who speak were once the siblings and friends of the myriad animals who are subjugated on farms, in laboratories, in rings, in tanks and cages, on stages, in concrete and grass, in planes and cars and boxes and bags, in any and all conceivable places. Because they once knew and experienced, they understand and speak out for all of the wrongs to be amended, to be remedied how they can.

Let this proposed idea be called unlikely, naïve, idealistic, fallacious. Let it be mocked. Let it be disproven. But when you are conscious of a world of suffering made to be irrelevant, we begin to "tell ourselves stories in order to live" as Joan Didion once phrased it.

For the world to cease to commit animal cruelty in its many fashions and learn the happiness and peace that is unconditional compassion… that is my greatest wish.

On the Artistic Nature of Writing

Photo found at http://www.goodfon.su/wallpaper/polotno-kraska-mazki.html

Writing must be viewed as an art. Just as any natural-born visual artist, someone who is destined to write feels a stirring within them self now and again to create. Side stepping the obligations we admittedly possess to our visually oriented counterparts, it is not untrue to assert that those who have quietly moved a pen across paper have been some of the loudest people to exist in all of time. In their minds there dance decibels unknown to most, and in their reserved and polite surface manner, there is a delectable and unapologetic tinge of the profane. They are often learning to be altogether unconcerned with the mingling of their work and the moving of social eyes and lips, and one of their favorite phrases to realize in action is “bar none.” Indeed, at the end of the day, ink on paper is of little difference than pastels on canvas. Both begin as nothing, are found to be inconclusive when in their middle stages, and at their completion are either criticized or praised. And perhaps most importantly, when the process has concluded, the master of the art will look upon the reviews and scoff delightedly and irreverently. Their work was not intended for the inevitable machine of rants and raves, no. Their work was always theirs.

Photo found at http://lylim.net/2011/12/14/observations-on-keeping-a-journal-1/

Nostalgia: Laughing Spells

I remember sitting in the corner and laughing uncontrollably and feeling all the better for it.

It was bubble tea night. 9:30 pm had come and gone and the line was out the door of the dining hall, which had the strangely appealing aura of a nineteen sixties summer camp dwelling. After sitting in front of a computer screen for the undertaking of far too many essays that I both loved and hated to write, I’d gone to see the end of semester dance concert. Afterwards, word got around that bubble tea would be served in the dining hall that night, and so I, like just about everyone else on campus, departed my dorm room to join some friends for the almost-end-of-the-school-year festivity.

I was later told that I was staggering in an intoxicated fashion down the hill towards the dining hall. In all earnestness, I’ve never touched drugs or alcohol, though I’ve heard on more than one occasion that I’ve acted, or rather, existed, as though under the influence the majority of my days. ("People don't realize that's it's possible to be so happy when sober," I've been told.) But I can swear that I only stumbled as I did out of awe over the stars. In the midst of the Berkshires with few buildings to cloud the sky and an open field that was given the name Siberia, one of my fondest memories of my college is and always will be the impeccable view of the night sky. Something in the stars taught me how to live a more erratically balanced life. I am forever grateful to them (the stars) for that.

I remember hearing my name called out by my friend further forward in the line, but it must not have quite registered as I resolved to stay absorbed in my own world in the tail of the line. Once inside, I found them at a corner table and alternated between listening to the conversation and laughing to myself. This was only one of my many inexplicable and mystifying spells of knowing bemusement (Note to readers: I am aware that I write in contradictions. Sometimes they seem more honest to me than any other sort of phrasing).

Since leaving college I’ve had these moments of delirious euphoria on a few occasions, and they are always when I feel the most like myself. I wonder what caused them to start and why I believe that they are so strongly at the heart of my essence. Perhaps it is their fading that worries me the most. In the meantime, I wait with bated breath for the onset of another moment of clarity through the medium of laughter. After all, laughter is the best medicine.

Musing On Bliss

Seen on the desk at a local bookstore

Flowers on my street

How can bliss be defined?

For me, it is one foot on the other with sandals beneath, or looking out my window to see a single light on in the apartment across the way (someone else is still awake and thinking too). It is waking up to a day of freedom and adventure, and it is that day’s end, one that’s been long and brought happiness. It is laughing without bounds, to myself or to someone else. It is any kind of love that isn’t turned on its side. It is smiling to a stranger and them smiling back. It is happy surprises: fluffy dogs in shops, street side proclamations of wisdom, unexpected flowers and other notations of beauty, and the fond memories one carries everywhere. It is contented sleepiness put to rest and the hope for another full and bright day to come. It is feeling that things are forgivable.

And finally, bliss, I believe, is being able to walk in the world and see something, anything, worth loving.

Share beauty with everyone

Words of wisdom

Came across this masterpiece on the sidewalk outside my apartment building

Writing: The Great Love and Lie

Image from http://dianaludwig.com/illus/wnwg9.html

Few things in this world frighten me so immensely as the reality of how it is all too easy to lie to ourselves, and to believe our lies so adamantly. Even when it comes to our greatest desires for our lives, we often fail to recognize the truth, even when it is one of the most important recognitions we could possibly make.

These days, I wake up each morning with a new lie weighing heavily on my mind. They’re uncovered in my dreams, in sleeplessness, in tears, in sighs of relief, and in the renewed promise of the early morning hours.

One of the biggest lies I have told myself is that I can be a truly fulfilled and happy person without writing as the central focus of my life. But as tears streamed down my face first in bed and then in such mundane places as the aisles of the grocery store, the palpability of my great lie became evident. Writing was always, has always been, a part of my very being. It compels me to live a more honest and meaningful existence. It makes sense when nothing else does. It is my great solace, and my great ardor.

But you can only kid yourself about such things as this for so long before you remember what is true. It isn’t anyone who’s heart rate speeds up after reading a good sentence, or who wakes each day to look at the Ernest Hemingway quote pasted up on the wall:

Image from http://www.qualitylogoproducts.com/blog/hemingway-quotes-inspire-blogging-writing/

This is, and I believe always will be, true for me. I will never be anything quite as much as I am a writer. And so long as a life of artificial and half-hearted pursuits is not the sort which I long to live, I have found that I must learn to do those things that call out to me (and still whisper to me when I've strayed). Indeed, my only option, it seems, is to hold desperately onto those enduring passions that are so sweetly rare, because when we are lucky enough to find something that means the world to us, that is an occasion that perhaps most begs us to quit our lies and surrender to self-confessed truths.

It is infrequently that I feel I am in such a position to offer advice. However, let this post convey one thing to all readers: If there is something that you love like nothing else in the world, something that keeps you up at night, something that seems like the most genuine pursuit you could possibly undertake, then you must go after it if you can. Not all are so lucky to have the opportunity to pursue the things they love, but if you are, do so humbly and graciously, and always feel a resounding love for that truth you tell to yourself and to the world.