After Easter
What becomes of the bunnies dumped in the woods, when Easter is over? The ducklings dropped off at the lake? The poor hens mass producing eggs for our enjoyment? How can we be so heartless? If someone treated our children with such carelessness, we’d be ready to scratch their eyes out. How many times do we need to hear: “We Are All One” before we believe it?
My heart breaks for every un-loved creature. Just wanting to be cherished, they cannot make sense of their abandonment. Why do we need to own what we don’t really need? To buy a bunny because it’s cute, because it’s somehow falsely tied in with the meaning of Easter, (through no fault of its own), only to discard it (when it starts acting like a rabbit), is giving our children the message that life is not to be respected, that living beings are expendable.
I wish we would visit happy animals (not at the zoo), in their natural surroundings, and teach our children that all forms of life are sacred (stomping on worms for fun is not acceptable), that each and every one of us deserves to be here. Deserves to be loved. Deserves to live, free from suffering. Deserves happiness.
Animals are not playthings for our amusement. Stuffed bunnies can be picked up by their ears and handled roughly. Real rabbits can be paralyzed. Ducklings need their mothers.
When our infants start crying, throwing up on us, refusing to sleep, do we return them to the hospital? (leave them on a doorstep? toss them in a dumpster? Some do, but that’s not the norm or there’d be not one of us left).
We need to wake up. We need to remember what’s most important. Money and devices and fancy gadgets are fun, but we are consumed by our consuming.
Go find a flower sweetly blooming. A bumblebee, sweetly finding it. We have lost such symbiosis, with our gathering of things. Love this great earth, as a mother loves her children. Tenderly, with devotion. Fiercely, always ready to show her incisors. Patiently, with never~ending trust in the goodness of grace and mercy. May love of beauty grant us wisdom.
May we heal all we have wounded. May the good Lord, or whomever you believe in, bless our fumbling footsteps, and lead us to the place of Peace.
LBM 4/22/2014
