A young girl was walking along a beach upon which thousands of starfish had been washed up during a terrible storm. When she came to each starfish, she would pick it up, and throw it back into the ocean. People watched her with amusement.
She had been doing this for some time when a man approached her and said, “Little girl, why are you doing this? Look at this beach! You can’t save all these starfish. You can’t begin to make a difference!”
The girl bent to pick up another starfish. Then she looked up at the old man, smiled and replied, “I can make a difference for this one.” And she threw it far out into the ocean.
This Solstice as the lights shine and the carols softly play, I’m grateful for so much—family (human family and dog family), work I love, a warm home, running water, clean air, heat, birds, trees and so much more—but there are dark spots sometimes obscuring the light, including the direction humanity seems to be going.
The lights shine and the carols softly play.
I look to Sparkle and Stash awaiting their treats in pools of wintery light. Sparkle raises her paw up a few inches from the floor. It gives me a shiver and reminds me of the email I just received from the Beagle Freedom Project that spoke of the kind and timid lab beagles trained with food to present their paws for injections.
Awaiting treats. Stash and Sparkle raising her paw.
I used to say that climate change was the biggest threat to humanity, perhaps singularity. I now say it has always been ignorance. Pad that with greed and grasping and we have the recipe we’ve played out over millennia. Ignorance dies hard. What we need to replace it with is the wisdom of the heart. When there is immense suffering, it can be hard to imagine we can affect any change and yet change has always begun from the small individual acts of courage and caring. Like the girl and the starfish or the old man who stops to move tiny toads from the road, telling his impatient companions the toads have places to go, too, caring deeply about what moves us is a way of tending to the world.
Were the animals left on their own without our interference, there would not be the large-scale suffering that comes from lives confined to labs or factory farms, not the widespread abuse to animals and planet perpetrated by humans in the name of progress, but often no more than ignorance or greed. Death to me has never seemed the issue so much as a life of suffering. I think again of those beagles bred and raised in sterile, metal cages who never once in their lives go outdoors and walk their feet on grass or feel the sunlight on their backs.
And yet, if the negative abounds in the news, it’s helpful to look at our current moment in time through the lens of history. Historian friends offer me another alternative, and that is that humans continue to improve. While in many respects, I see evidence of this—bills passed that don’t require animal testing, greater awareness about the foods we eat including the environmental toll of raising animals, measures on climate change, measures on greater equality—I still find that the vast amount of suffering in the world has been caused by humans. Or perhaps I should say caused by excess and the desire for power.
The antidote? For me it has always come from nature. One step outdoors on a brisk winter evening into the entrancing beauty of a still and starry night is enough to let me see the miracle of all life. As the temperatures dip well below freezing, a crescent moon curls between the outstretched arms of one very old walnut tree. I step into this scene of stillness and serenity and stand awed in the presence of something beyond human words. The walnut tree is well over a hundred years old. And for some reason, this slice of continuity gives me hope.
There are some very human miracles happening daily, too: great acts of kindness and selflessness. There are other human antidotes that connect us through time: Handel and Bach and the power of music. If I’m feeling the overwhelm of the world gone wrong, I say to the dogs, “What we need is Bach.” (Or Mozart, Dvořák, Vivaldi, or whoever, across centuries, stirs your heart strings.)
Then, too, it helps to take a different perspective and realize that our perception of reality is but one tiny slice of the universal reality in which we and so many life forms inhabit. When I feel the ugliness of human destruction, I stand back and watch the play of light on the mountains beyond and think, “We’re all standing on a planet floating in space!”
And finally, as T. H. White tells us, when you feel sorrow, learn:
“The best thing for being sad,” replied Merlin. “Is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then—to learn. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting.” —The Once and Future King
What do my wise and guileless teachers tell me? The same things they’ve been saying forever, “Slow down, work less, appreciate the wonder of each individual day that will never return.” Somehow, in loving all the good that is out there we shift the paradigm. I don’t know how, but I feel that loving the whole world can’t hurt.
Now, there come days, in between the cold, crisp days of mid-Winter, where a balmy warmth carries the scent of spring to come. But tonight the earlier rain has just turned to snow and now ticks against the window panes. Sparkle and Stash lie curled in dog balls, warmed by the woodstove. As I stroke them, speaking softly, I send my love to all the beagles behind bars, to all dogs, all animals, all beings who may not know the goodness and peace that these two live daily.
Siberian elm and silver maple silhouetted.