I feel a strange energy today about me. I am vital.
I often leave my office desk at lunch, after eating a nice organic, vegan meal, and retreat to the pond that my office building overlooks. There are children out there fishing with lazy parents and grandparents sitting in lawn chairs giving offhand orders to the children about how to cast the line, hook the worm, catch the fish, and kill the fish.
One little boy caught repeatedly during my forty minutes sitting on the dirty pavement beside the pond little fish. Hooked through and airless, each fish was squished between his unkind hands as he removed the hook and flopped the fish indifferently back into the pond.
There have been dead fish on a string floating just off the bank of the pond, left bloated and wasted by the darkness of our minds. Yet, these have not bothered me as much as watching the little brother of the kid catching small fish catch a large fish and let the large fish suffocate to death on the hook. I did not see the suffocation. When the fish was shown to me, it had already passed. The little child, only about 4 or 5, thought nothing of this.
I said a silent prayer for all the fish in the pond. I apologized to them for the indifference we show them when we take their lives for no particular reason. I felt them alive in me, and they were redeemed in their passing: Souls gone on to greater expressions. I promised that I would teach all children possible that killing any creature is never necessary.
Yet, I feel calm about their passing even if I see no need for human beings to bring that about. Nothing is really harmed unless I think it is. I am a strange energy today. I like it. I feel more alive.
4 comments:
I really need to get away from it all. What to do? Hmm...Hey, how about?...Yeah, why don't I go out and lure some unwitting creature to myself by lacerating its mouth and then suffocating it, standing passively by as its eyes bulge out of socket in a futile attempt to gasp for another breath of water.
Thankfully, the times I've been "fishing" (really an inappropriate term given the more apt description above) in the distant past of my pre-teen years, I never caught anything. I spent all my time trying to figure out how to work a rod and reel, cutting tangled lines, and really never even getting to that point because I couldn't bear the excruciating torture (in my own emotional experience) of skewering a worm onto a hook, feeling it writhe with pain and blood as I slowly thread it fully onto the hook.
Oh, I could use synthetic lures, right? Well, I would still have the first scenario problem.
No, no, kick back and relax, young man. Enjoy your friends and their conversation. Have a few more beers, please. This is the good life. Violent capture and suffocation is really the good life, I promise--you'll see one day when you become a "man."
Scintillating commentary. The sparks fly when you put hands to keyboard, Dustin. I love the twist at the end. One day the fish I so callously hold may catch me. Our fates hang in the balance. :)
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