Talia's Dance of Joy

Woke up early this morning and decided to take a couple of bunnies outside for some fresh air and playtime, before this hateful climate kicks in and the temperature screams into triple-digits again. My Flemish Giant girl Peaches always gets to run free in the yard; she needs the exercise but rarely gets it, preferring as she does to park her ample tushie under a bougainvillea bush and contemplate her plans for world domination. I have an exercise pen on the back patio and I like to bring another of the bunnies outside for a little fun-time. This morning it was Talia's turn.
Talia is an incredibly sweet little agouti-brown girl, about 6-8 months old with a huge fluffy white-on-the-bottom tail and completely adorable helicopter ears. When she came to the rabbit rescue about a month ago I could barely believe what I saw. Apparently she had been bitten in the face by another animal and the wound had gotten horrendously infected. The whole left side of her face was swollen and misshapen, and there was so much pus in her face it was starting to leak upwards through her tear duct and out her eye. I had never seen an infection so bad and out of control. I took pictures of her when she first came to me but I hesitate to publish one in this blog because they are so hard to look at. Trust me when I tell you she looked truly awful and I can't imagine the pain and discomfort she had to live with for God knows how long.

Talia ended up staying at the animal hospital for over three weeks, as they did several surgeries on her to reconstruct her eyelids and clean out all the infection and prurient material. Finally she was released and came back to our rescue, and I went up earlier this week to scoop her up and bring her to my home for some much-deserved spoiling and TLC. Miraculously, she has not lost vision in her left eye.

Despite all she has gone through Talia is still an extremely happy, trusting bunny. As I sat on my patio enjoying the (temporary) coolness of the morning, Talia could not contain herself and started a very extended performance of the Rabbit Dance of Joy, or "binky" as it is known technically. She scampered and frolicked around her exercise pen, running in and out and around the cut-out cardboard box I put in there. There was a lot of happy jumping, spinning in the air and kicking-up of heels. She stood up high on her back legs, telescoping her body as much as possible to sniff the spring breezes and see as far as she could. After nearly an hour of that she calmed down just a little bit and spent time diligently examining the inside of her cardboard shelter. Just now she flopped down on the bottom of the pen, kicking her back legs fully out behind her. But after a minute or two she will jump up again and start her happy dancing anew, punctuating each move with a sideways hop and a sassy shake of her floppy ears.

Seeing her in such a state of unbridled joy brings me a great deal of happiness and satisfaction. Knowing how she looked when she came to us and seeing her now so full of joy and life, it makes me eternally grateful for groups like Brambley Hedge Rabbit Rescue whose mission it is to take severely mistreated rabbits such as Talia and literally give them a second chance at life. I don't know what her final veterinarian bill will be, but I'm sure it will be staggering. Without the care she received through BHRR, it is very doubtful she would be alive right now. That BHRR will spend that kind of money to give an innocent little creature another chance to run, jump, spin and dance again is to me one of the miracles of existence that make life worthwhile.

I'm not going off on a rant again about how stupid, evil, loathsome and detestable human beings are, especially the ones that put Talia in such an horrible situation and then dumped her off at the animal shelter with a terse "We don't want her anymore!" and a $3 donation. If I had a dollar for every time I wanted to go postal on some ignorant human being for being a cruel, swinish dirtbag I would be typing this blog from my villa on the Cote d'Azur and Stevie Nicks would be serving me cocktails with little paper parasols in them. I just hope that karma comes down on those people with the weight of a thousand blazing suns, and they have to experience the pain of being discarded like a piece of trash, which is actually better than they deserve. Talia will always have some physical scars from her ordeal; if she has any mental scars, I can't tell what they are. Rabbits can be so incredibly, unbelievably resilient in the wake of horrific, heartless cruelty and ignorance. If only humans could be one-tenth as noble.

As for me, I'm just going to watch Talia dance and hop and binky in the morning breeze, and think of happier things.

Perfect Moments in Life

What is this thing we call life, the gift of existence and consciousness bestowed upon us when we part company with the womb at birth? Is it like a cosmic pinball game where we are the little metal balls and bounce from event to event, moment to moment, careening off in different directions depending on the event? Does our sense of time give us a better (or worse) idea of our destinies?

I think of the present as a singularity, an instant in time. We are surfers riding the very crest of the wave of time, teetering on the edge and rushing toward some distant, unknowable future. All the moments of our lives have brought us to this very point in time, everything we have ever done has contributed to us being right here, right now, and is the springboard to whatever fate has in store for us. And where we will go in the future is about as easy to predict as exactly where a leaf is going to touch the ground when it falls from a branch 30 feet high.

Humans have an understanding of the present, as do all forms of life, but we are also saddled with a memory of the past and anticipation of the future. It's hard to be sure if other animals would have detailed memories of the past or a concept of the future - they live completely and totally in the moment. Although who's to say the blue whales or porpoises or the great apes such as gorillas, chimpanzees and orangutans don't have similar understandings of time? We don't know, but humans certainly do. And, as is their wont, humans will embellish their concept of time with regret for things that happened in the past and entitlement for things that will happen in the future. Consequently humans experience time as a great mishmash of past, present and future all blurred together. Our present experience is colored with remembrances of the past and hopes, fears and desires for the future. But what about the times in our lives when the past and future drop away and we are living precisely, totally and perfectly in the present? These are some of my perfect moments in life:

I can remember as a child growing up in the Pittsburgh area one extremely frigid winter morning when I had to go on an errand or something. The sun was up but there was an icy haze to the air that filtered the sunlight and let the blue from the sky illuminate everything. It must have been single-digit temperature, and the ground was covered with a thick layer of dry snow that crunched loudly under my feet. I walked past a neighbor's house where they were drying their laundry in the clothes dryer, and the warm, moisture-laden air was being pushed outside through a vent. When the hot, moist air hit the dry, extremely cold outside air it immediately turned into massive, white billowing clouds of steam, which rolled and boiled out in fantastic, cloud-like shapes. There was also this amazing, pure, wonderfully clean fragrance of clothes and fabric softener and warmth that was just startling and incredible. The confluence of that wonderful, homey fragrance, the icy, frozen morning air and soft, blue skylight in that instant merged into a total memory experience that I haven't forgotten all these years. For an instant I was lost in those billowing, fragrant clouds of steam and I loved it.

Another time it was a summer evening at my childhood home in Pittsburgh. The weather had been very hot and uncomfortable for a while, but the day before some massive thunderstorms rolled through the area and, as often was the case, a cold front behind it brought deliciously cool, clear and dry air from Canada to our area. It was nearly nine o'clock in the evening and the sun had set about a half-hour before in the western sky. All the red and orange sunset colors had faded, leaving only a band of brilliant, ice-blue twilight on the horizon. I stood in my back yard and just gazed out at this beautiful band of blue light against the darkening sky and the inky horizon, feeling the incredibly pleasurable cool breeze and the silence of a summer evening. There was a business, I think it was a bank, in a town a mile or so away from me up the hill and they had these electronic chimes that rang out the hour. Right at 9pm as I breathlessly savored the cool blueness and serenity of the twilight the chimes started playing, and this very ethereal, dreamlike and pastoral music drifted in on the breeze from a distance like a whispered vesper prayer. The music danced in and out on the breeze, fading slightly and becoming louder at random, and I can remember being utterly transfixed and mesmerized by this perfect nexus of sight, sound and feeling. The past and future did not exist for me - there was only this moment of complete, total peace. I don't think I have ever had such a feeling of happiness and contentment in all my life. It only lasted a minute or two, but it was transcendent in its beauty and I will never forget it.

Today being Easter Sunday 2009, I invariably think back nearly fifty years to another Easter Sunday when I was in third grade. Easter was a movable feast and in western Pennsylvania was always at the mercy of the weather - sometimes it could be decent but often enough it was cold, blustery and rainy, even snowy. But that particular Easter occurred late in the spring and the weather was gloriously clear, warm and sunny. The gentle March weather that year had resulted in the pear tree in our back yard being absolutely loaded down with hundreds if not thousands of fragrant white blossoms. I can remember looking up and seeing golden sunlight filtering down through this incredible canopy of white flowers, and the soft warm breezes touching my face really did feel like a gentle kiss. I was dressed up in my finest Easter outfit and I just felt so perfect and clean and special, almost like being reborn. If there is a heaven it must be an awful lot like that sunny Easter Sunday morning in my backyard, all pure radiance and clean light and white blossoms. Again a moment of complete peace and contentment, something all the intervening years and events cannot possibly dampen.

These are just some of the moments that have made my life so rich and worth remembering for me. Please take a moment to remember one or more of YOUR special moments in life, when everything was perfect at that very moment and you didn't want anything more or less than what you had right then. Remember them, the precious, perfect moments that make up a life.