You have a wonderful appreciation of nature!!! And a poetic way of describing it!!!
Unduly kind of you, but thanks.
I do have an appreciation for nature, and for animals. I could go on about them all day. But I was raised in the country, and don’t have any illusions about any of it either. Compared to what nature has to offer, virtually any human husbandry is extremely benign. I know there are people who treat animals cruelly. But very few farmers and ranchers do, and the ones who do don’t last, because it’s economically stupid, and can be dangerous. Besides, it’s pointless and serves no human purpose. Most farmers and ranchers are actually kind to their animals, but if they have any sense at all, it’s a “kindness” that fits within the nature of the animal. It’s not the “human-to-human” kind. Kindness to animals is an altogether different thing.
Life isn’t so terribly kind to people either. We get sick. We have heartbreaks. We are treated cruelly. We get injured. We die.
But animals just are not people. What causes them pain is not what causes me pain, and vice-versa. One could say of them that they have emotions of a sort, but they’re not human emotions by miles and miles. What they have in the way of “desire” is not even remotely what we have. What they have as “fears” are nothing like human fears. What they have in the way of what we might superficially think of as “kindness” or “cruelty” don’t resemble our kindnesses or cruelties at all. (Animals are breathtakingly “cruel” if you think of them in human terms, but you can’t.) They’re not us, and we’re not them. Maybe you have to live among them a good while to know all that.
I have sometimes thought about “place” in creation, and it’s a marvelous thing to think about. The ancient Greeks, for example, made a very big deal out of "place’. “Hubris” was not so much “pride” as we think of it, but more a matter of attempting to exceed your “place”; your proper role. If you did, then the Erinys would ensure your downfall. Pagans were not without insight. Virtually the whole of the “Iliad” is about that. And, when I think about God, and about my Catholicism, I often think about it in terms of “place”. What’s my role? Am I fulfilling it or departing from it? I realize St. Therese of Lisieux was about more than that, but she had a remarkable sense of, respect for, and acceptance of “place”. And that sense was her comfort and much of her spirituality. She did not fear sin. She did not fear the devil. She did not fear her Creator. She did not fear damnation. And it was because she did not aspire to be something she was not, but accepted her ordained “place”. She did aspire to sainthood, and said so. But it was within the context of her own “place”.
We go through this world worrying all the time about how we fit into all of what we see around us, and don’t see. We worry about what we do or should do or think we should do, and in the process often lose sight of our “place” and the “places” of other things. Should I eat this apple and destoy its beauty? Should I pick this rose, knowing I will make it wither if I do? Should I resist this person or not do it? Should I eat this animal? Should I shoot this copperhead just to get rid of him; perhaps as a threat to a child someday or perhaps leave him as a threat only to rats?
Obviously, St. Francis of Assisi had a “place” that was different from that of, say, St. Benedict. Benedictines were animal husbandmen from the very first, and still are. A Benedictine will eat a steak with gusto. So, is their “place” the same as that of Carmelites, who never eat meat? We have to think not, and we have to think that somehow there is grace in both things. But they’re different things; different “places”.
