Bird Droppings October 3, 2012

Why are we only a small part of all that is?

It is often very difficult for some to except being simply a part of and not the central focus of life around them. I was watching the beginning of the movie Seven Pounds and in the first scene or two the main character is talking about a trip to an aquarium and watching the jellyfish. As I spoke with my son watching this picture unfold a jellyfish is a colonial type organism, many differing cells making up a single creature. As I am watching each piece of the puzzle of that jellyfish is doing its part for the whole to survive.

 

“Every living thing is alive thanks to the living of everything else. The planet earth is a single cell. A person is ethical only when every living cell, whether plant or animal, is considered sacred and divine.” Dr. Lewis Thomas, the former Dean of the Medical School, Yale University

Somehow probably because I was on the extreme end opposite most of the others I became involved in the politic club in our high school eight years ago.  As I went in the right was situated on the left ironically and the left on the right to that first meeting. I first sat next to the teacher on the left side of the room slowly my chair drifted to the right with the door gapping open and a hallway for escape. Perhaps I should have been somewhere out there rather than in that room. A comment was made that really concerned me on that day eight years ago. From a student in an American high school; “An American life is worth more than any other life”, and then proceeded to comment “that if we lose other lives and save one American life it is justified”. In my own philosophical debate I can see that other life looking back through two eyes and listening to the rhetoric with two ears and retaliating with two hands and we deem that retaliation wrong.

“I believe that the moral education centers upon this conception of the school as a mode of social life, that the best and deepest moral training is precisely that which one gets through having to enter into proper relations with others in a unity of work and thought. The present educational systems, so far as they destroy or neglect this unity, render it difficult or impossible to get any genuine, regular moral training.” John Dewey

How can we even argue from an issue of morality and be removing value from life regardless of whose life that is and even technically what life that is involved. In this same discussion the Alaska wilderness came up and drilling there, “why not it is only wilderness” several students chimed in. Granted this is coming from a high school student who has only been walking the earth for sixteen years. I walked out into the darkness as I do every morning taking our dog out and to clear my head for a moment from a cold that has been hindering my thinking for several days just before getting my day started. The sounds and sights are only limited to our own perception, very few crickets this morning as we had a front come through last night and with it rain and an occasionally tree frog chirps though it is a bit chilly for most tree frogs.

“What is life?  It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime.  It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.” Crowfoot, Blackfoot warrior and orator, 1870

I have used this quote so many times and each time reflects back to days when I would walk across our pastures in the early morning checking for lambs or calves. Our buffalo bull would be at his post watching the herd and his breath against the chill of the morning as he watched me, always wary and I think back to Crowfoot’s question, “What is life?” We can so easily dismiss all others. Situated in our bathroom is an old National Geographic circa 1998 or so really not that old. The article is about death in various countries from civil war’s aftermath in Sudan, Angola, Ethiopia, and across Africa. Literally millions have died in these wars and the consequences of wars from starvation and illness.

“It’s not how much we give but how much love we put into giving….Everybody today seems to be in such a terrible rush, anxious for greater developments and greater riches and so on, so that children have very little time for their parents…… Parents have very little time for each other, and in the home begins the disruption of peace of the world. We can not do great things. We can only do little things with great love.” Mother Theresa

 

I do not believe you would hear from in her life the words that any life was more precious than another or that any one person was greater than another. This very tiny wisp of humanity would give tirelessly of her time and love to those in need, most of that life spent in the slums of Calcutta where most westerners would not even venture she lived and cared.

 

“No, I wouldn’t touch a leper for a thousand pounds; yet I willingly cure him for the love of God.” Mother Theresa

Money was not the issue, politics was not the issue, it was that leper needed someone and she was the person that was nearest. We all too often look for gain in our efforts, “what’s in it for us?”

“A kind and compassionate act is often its own reward.” William John Bennett

Often times I find myself reading from various articles from the Society of Friends (Quakers). It is interesting reading and more than simply a figure on a cereal box or commercial for food bars.

 

“I expect to pass through this world but once. Any good therefore that I can do, or any kindness that I can show to any fellow creature, let me do it now. Let me not defer or neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again.” William Penn

It was many years ago a young man was being lead away by soldiers and a faithful follower drew his sword and tried to intervene and was stopped by the young man, violence was not the way. At that moment an example was set, and so many profess to that example yet utter comments in total paradox. I refer back to William Penn a man who came to this country for religious freedom; he was a man who believed in peace. I will repeat one more time from the words of William Penn.

“I expect to pass through this world but once. Any good therefore that I can do, or any kindness that I can show to any fellow creature, let me do it now. Let me not defer or neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again.”

Let us keep all in harm’s way in our hearts and on our minds and also be thinking about and looking into ways to alleviate harm every again befalling another and to always give thanks namaste.

Wa de (Skee)

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