In the morning: watching my black kitty "play" with a white moth...she's killing it, of course, killing it slowly as its tiny moth ganglia jam up with survival/flight responses, the ancestors of fear. I used to rescue bugs, slugs, and spiders from the cats, and still usually try to save the latter two (slugs are nasty when squished, and I like spiders), but the law of the jungle prevails more and more in the shadow'd halls of the Temple of Doom, as I admit to myself that even bugs make choices and even kitties create karma that they and only they can deal with...even kitties have True Wills, and a cat can't be a cat without killing (pace the Dalai Lama).
[Don't fear, Dear Reader; were I to chance upon you beset by ruffians, I would do all in my power to effect your safe escape...which makes me speciesist, I guess...]
Later that morning: I'm at my alma mater for a professional development workshop, I'm there early, eating in the cafeteria whose glass walls look out onto a garden patio. Thinking about my killer kitty, I can see birds swooping down on bugs, and groundskeepers and custodians preyed upon by the American economy... who/what am I preying upon w/ my blueberry bagel, chocolate pudding, coffee? Juan Valdez, no doubt, still searching for his desaparecida daughter...milk from a cow imprisoned in some hellish factory farm...
...fondly remembering (even as I drink it) this bitter coffee that propelled me so many mornings to academic glory, my radio show, assignations with the Goddess in library stacks or Wiccan circles or greening boughs scattering light and shadow across the bricks of my future...the coffee's awkward bite like a solecism on the lips of one beloved: wrong but in completely the right way.
Going out the door I find an emerald-winged and ermine-throated, very dead bird on the sidewalk, sped towards his future by who knows what predation, finding its fulfillment in false trees and sky of the building's glass facade.
Saturday, May 27, 2006
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Then there's the house spider that lives in our needs-to-be-replaced kitchen sink, whom I believe has eaten her spiderlings prior to tucking another egg case beneath the sock that once absorbed water leaks from the faucet. (The sock dates from before a broken flange created a lovely and spirited fountain, requiring us to shut off completely the water to the sink. Hence its new purpose as spider home.)
ReplyDeleteSeveral crickets have become unwitting cat toys. We don't always get to them in time. Our back yard has sported the disembodied head of a cardinal, which I believe came courtesy of a local owl.