i'll know I'm a saint when I love mosquitos
in my Dillard era
What keeps the world going is a thousand acts of tenderness toward unimportant things and people you don’t have any relation toward except you assume responsibility for.
I take pride in caring for all of the potted plants I’ve ever adopted. The one loss—an anthurium that was browning in my attic room and so I transplanted it to a bigger pot in an airier room until it slowly withered—stings all the more. Sure, plants don’t have souls, but they have life which is more than you can say for an iPhone or an SUV or the internet, which spend plenty of time maintaining.
We live too much among dead things.
We have been so well-formed not to let our heart bleed even just a little for the things and people that are usually treated like collateral damage: the birds that fly into windows, the turtle underneath the car wheels, the man who missed his plane.
The engines keep going, the forms are filled out, the small acts of mercy that get anyone to their final destination don’t figure into our algorithms.
We live in a world of machines—machines don’t care about the very soft and squishy flesh we’re made of that’s so susceptible to damage. How did we create a world so hard-edged? Ever since humans discovered iron we have been fascinated by these creations made in the image and likeness of our most stubborn powers. Our bones may be inside our skin but we do love our exoskeletons. We feel for a moment like we are also a two-ton killing machine. The deer hits the hood with a thump and then is eaten by vultures over the course of a weekend. We forget, in this picture, that our lot is the deer’s.
The machine will never feel pain, from its birth on the factory floor to its death in the junkyard. So why do we identify more with the car, when death will one day hit us, like the deer, and we will depend on the kindness of those still living to mourn us and carry us to a grave?
We are so cavalier about the death of the beautiful.
Machines want us, their makers, to believe that we are like them: powerful, eternal, untouchable.
But we are like what the machines have paved over and dug up: we are made of dust and humus, and we will one day return to the rich clay we came from. Concrete, what have you to do with me? What can we possibly learn about human nature from steel? Machines know nothing about what it is to be born or what it is to die, events that bring us into life from somewhere and set us back to rest into something.
Humans are so divorced from the land of the living. We have forgotten our kinship with the earth and instead spend our days in the land of the dead.
I read about a man who tortured a wolf in Wyoming and I thought how sad that he no longer knows who he is or knows that he is human. He thinks he is a car—exempt from the circle of life or any sort of ecosystem—he thinks he owes creation nothing and it exists for no reason that has anything to do with him. What does he see when he looks at the world outside? Does he feel like a stranger to the trees? How can you see anything clearly if you don’t look at a bluebird—much less a wolf—with awe? Killing has to happen, sure—I’ve swatted several mosquitos while writing this—but isn’t being an agent of death something to mourn rather than relish?
I thought of the fox that Rainy the Cat and I saw twice last Friday, visiting the compost heap in the morning and the evening.
We opened the front door and saw a flash of copper in the woods past the driveway. Rainy, so quick to dash across the yard like a small grey lion (big or small, cats all have the same gait) in hot pursuit of squirrels or bold songbirds, settled into her watchful loaf position next to me, eyeing the fox carefully as he worked his way back toward the creek.
Catherine Raven says housecats can harass foxes, but he looked twice as big as the cat. I couldn’t imagine her causing him any harm, particularly as she folded herself into my shadow, watching.
And Rainy is not a fearful feline—she climbed two trees on Monday and, despite some crying at a challenging fork in the branches—made her way back down both again with only a little bit of skidding.
I have grown to love our daily walks—a ritual that began in Holy Week—where we explore some small stretch of pine woods together, walking with an invisible line between us, moving in that universal, inter-species communication of togetherness.
Every mammal knows the sign for “come on, this way”: you take a few steps and turn and look expectantly. Your companion—be they human, cat, dog, or deer—will follow. If they get too distracted by the glowing rectangle in her hand or a hole at the base of an oak tree, then just call their name or mew a little bit, and they’ll get the message.
Now she is licking the bag of birdseed I just brought home from the store. Rainy loves licking plastic—a Ziploc bag from Minnesota, a package of Cadbury chocolates, the packaging on pads and tampons—she will lick obsessively until I intervene, afraid she’ll bite a small piece off and choke.
I looked it up on the internet (cat aficionados have even more opinions than gardeners), and the general consensus seemed to be that cats just love plastic. Plastic appears dead but is made out of living things—it’s made of vegetable oils and animal fats, and, apparently, cats get excited about smelling and tasting those.
I wonder sometimes what the world looks like from the perspective of the cat, who is too alive to see the world as dead.