Day 126

Mr Tom running away from me, up my beaten track.  Yesterday it was snakes, today a turkey, who ran from me on his strong legs which match the colour of his wattle.  Turkeys have such weird appendages, with strange names too.  The snood is a bit like a penis in that it engorges with blood when the turkey is doing his spring mating dance, gets all large and hangs down over his beak, while at other times it is much smaller. 

I ran 3.13 miles (5.03 km)  my second 5 km!  My family says that I should run a 5k run now, a public one, but I am loath to do that , because I always need a pee somewhere along the way, and also I always stop at least once to look at something.  Starting off again is difficult once you have completely stopped, but I can't help myself sometimes, for a cloud with a silver lining, or two mockingbirds singing away to one another, hidden in the foliage of a dense tree, or a large bird with weird growths on its head running away from me, when it has wings with which it could fly, or to watch my bees, trying to deduce how they are doing, whether the virgin queen has hatched yet.  I took 45 minutes to run 5km, but I did stop for all these things.

After my run I was opening Nick's blinds to let in the lovely day, and noticed a strange barefoot man moving stealthily through the trees near the bird-feeder.  On further study I saw that he was stalking a turkey.  I opened the window and leaned out to say, in my most severe school-ma'am manner, "Excuse me, but what are you doing?"  He looked completely shocked, and then Dawn, the young woman who is boarding next door, stepped out of the door and said that he was her friend, that she had bet him he couldn't take down the turkey!  I told him to leave the turkey alone, and shut the window in disgust.

I hope he gets poison ivy.

from the WWF magazine, focus:
"Bhutan's monarchy has put conservation at the centre of its development paradigm.  They have massive reserves to protect snow leopards and tigers, black bears and red pandas, which are extremely rare.  The people of the Himalayas are at the forefront of conservation and one of the main reasons for this is that they follow a religion that venerates all living things." 

The Eastern and Western religions of Buddhism and Christianity are so different that they are almost opposites.  Patriarchal Christianity puts man above every other animal, (including woman) and states that all these animals are intended for man's use.  Buddhists could be said to be pantheistic, but it is more a set of ethical practices, a philosophy.  There is no one omnipotent god as in Christianity.

Imagine a world where people venerated all living things.  I would delight in living in such a place.

This is my Fish Goddess, the protector of the sea, my beloved ocean which is becoming increasingly more acidic, endangering all life within it. The ocean water in which I learnt to swim,and in which I continue to act like a fish as often as I can, is at such terrible risk, and we continue polluting it, in many cases without thought. 

I have been reading a book called Eaarth, by Brian McKibben, who posits that the earth we are living on is already changed, that it is already as though all six billion people have landed on a harsh and unpredictable planet, as in the old science fiction tales, and that we have to change our ways of living, our very societies, to deal with this.  On the back jacket of the book is written, "Eaarth is an astonishingly important book that will knock you down and pick you up."  I am still at the knocked down phase.