Recently I was talking with a friend in Santa Barbara who is a physician specializing in PTSD. I asked her what the possible forms might be for healing trauma that are cheap, free, simple and require no outside expertise. Before I could finish my question, her reply was, “Basketweaving.” I sat in mute surprise for a moment, and then she went on to explain that she has been studying basket weaving with a local Chumash master weaver for the past eight years, during which time she has been able to unlock and heal her own severe childhood trauma. Many cultures, including the Maya, teach that the crafting by hand of everyday objects is an act of offering to the Divine, one that is uniquely human. Talismans, baskets, carving, beadwork, plates of food and libations on altars and in the wild are all ways of expressing love and appreciation to the mysteries of life, and of coming into alignment with them. That these things have been corrupted, co-opted or commodified only affirms their inherent power, offerings and talismans in particular.
In 2008, while on safari to Tanzania with a group of former child soldiers and several Liberian staff members of everyday gandhis, I dreamed I was cutting chunks of flesh from my belly and making them into talismans, folded and pinned shut with sticks. They looked like bulging tacos fastened with toothpicks. In the dream, I crafted the talismans quickly and easily, my fingers moving confidently to assemble all the necessary materials, in addition to my own flesh. I then re-inserted the talismans into my stomach – no blood, no pain – just these many folded packets containing I knew not what (but precious and benevolent, of that I was sure), each one fastened with a twig – perhaps a piece of a filigreed branch from a baobab tree. As I made them, I put them in my belly and there they remained as I went about my day, as if they contained tiny living beings and I had become a tranquil mother of baby talismans. When I told the dream at breakfast the next morning, several of the Liberian elders who were with us became greatly alarmed. They still mention it with great worry when we see each other. They regarded me with a strange new wariness, and gave me wide berth, no matter how often I assured them that the talismans were harmless and caused no pain, and that I had awoken from the dream feeling calm and reassured by its benevolence.
This question of talismans is especially interesting. In all cultures and religions, talismans are common. The word itself is derived from Arabic and Greek roots meaning ‘to initiate into the mysteries’. The tallis or orthodox Jewish prayer shawl, the mezuza, the crucifix, medals of saints, holy water, four-leaf-clovers, rabbit’s feet, charm bracelets, all these and more were and are talismans meant to provide luck and protection through a direct and durable connection with the Divine. Other forms, such as some types of voodoo and juju, make use of talismans for power and sometimes harm. Buildings, pots, statues, poems, anything given physical form by human hands can be intended as talismans or can become one. Here is a question: How do we ourselves become living talismans, embodied expressions of alignment with the earth and all that is holy, for the benefit of all?
Showing posts with label Love. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Love. Show all posts
Sunday, June 15, 2014
Sunday, May 25, 2014
AKOI
I have a son who is a veteran. His name is Akoi. He’s not my ‘born son’ as they say in Liberia, but I am supporting him and 5 of his brothers – well, they’re not his born brothers, either, but they call each other brothers, and they have lived like brothers since the civil war there. I am one of their many mothers. They call me Ma Cyndie and I like it.
It was March, 3, 2003. Akoi says that the morning of the attack, he was in the communication room. He says he didn’t feel like fighting that day, but they were under attack and he had to go try to radio for help, since he was in charge of communications. He had learned from his first commander, Sea Never Dry, to be a communicator. When they brought ammunition to the base headquarters, Akoi would unpack it, take inventory and make a record of everything. His commander decided to train him as a communicator. In one week, he learned all the code numbers and code words, and had his own radio. His fighting name was Boy Blue.
The day of the attack, government troops surrounded them and attacked at 5 in the morning. His commander that day was Chief Combat. After the communication room was hit, he ordered Akoi and a few others to run for the car to go rescue those that were trapped. When they got into the artillery car, a heavy weapons car, a rocket propelled grenade sliced through the top of Akoi’s head, splitting it open like a pumpkin. He dropped to the floor of the car and everyone thought he was dead. They brought him back to the base and laid him out on the floor. Someone took a photo: Boy Blue is lying on his back on a blue plastic tarp, with several teenage boys kneeling beside him. A short distance away, there is something that looks like a small dish with a pile of glistening raw meat. It is the top of his skull and half his brain. His commander puts the piece of skull with the brains back on Akoi’s head and ties it on with a piece of string. They put him in a car and drive to Guinea. If he dies on the highway, they will bury him by the side of the road. He spends two days in a border town in a coma. On the third day he awakens to find himself lying in the middle of a hospital room with fifteen other patients. When he opens his eyes, he asks why he is there. The boy lying next to him says, “You are wounded.” Boy Blue can’t move his body. He can only cry.
They drive him back into Liberia, to the town of Voinjama and take him to what’s left of the hospital. Someone goes looking for Akoi’s mother. They know where she is hiding in the bush. They tell her that her son is badly wounded and bring her to see him. She tells him, “I don’t think, Akoi, that I will ever see you again.” People tell her, “Don’t cry. Depend on God. God will help. When they brought him here he was not talking, not opening his eyes to see people, and now he can see and say, ‘Oh, my Mother.’” The soldiers send for another car to take him back to Guinea, to the capital, Conakry. His mother begs to go with him because she knows she is the only one who can care for him properly. She says, “If he dies, I will be able to see where he’s buried.” But they tell her, “No. This car is only for critically wounded soldiers”. He is 14 and he’s been fighting for 2 years, ever since he was kidnapped from his village by the people trying to save him now.
She wants to cook for him. She insists on cooking for him, knowing that it will be his last meal. They wait for her to cook the meal. She returns to the hospital with his favorite dish. She wakes him up and holds him in her arms to feed him, but he is unable to eat, so she sits by his bed and weeps. They weep together as he drifts in and out of consciousness.
They put him in the car and drive nonstop for 21 hours. When they arrive at the hospital in Conakry, a French doctor unwraps the bandages from Akoi’s head, and weeps. The wound is festering and has begun to smell. Akoi undergoes more than a dozen surgeries. After a time he can sit up, but he is paralyzed on one side and confined to a wheelchair. Someone took another photo. A small teenage boy in white diapers stares without expression at the camera. He cannot bathe, dress or feed himself. He watches television with the other patients, and wishes he were dead. He forces himself to learn to walk with a stick, saying, “God will make a way for me.” The war ends in June, 2003, two months after he is wounded. On July 27, he is discharged from the hospital. They give him a plastic bag with two shirts, two pairs of trousers, and the doctor’s name and address on a piece of paper that got lost on the way home.
When he returns to Voinjama, his mother is overjoyed. She has been taken by LURD rebels, his sisters have been taken by government troops and are in a refugee camp. His mother begins to search for food in the bush, a little to eat, a little to sell. The heat and the strain cause the top of her skull to separate, a serious and usually fatal illness. She survives but has a nervous breakdown and never fully recovers. Her face is permanently contorted and her speech is slurred. Akoi says, “After that, her mind is so disturbed, not settled.”
During the disarmament, the U.N. gives Akoi $150, half of the total payment he will receive for turning in his gun. He gives his mother $50 for medical treatment, sends $75 to his sisters in the camp and uses the last $25 to go see them and beg them to come take their mother to the camp in hopes she can receive medical attention there. The sisters and the mother stay in the camp until repatriation. In 2004 the UN gives him money and he goes back to school, but in 2006 the program ends. Because he is paralyzed on one side, he cannot do any physical work to support himself so he bands together with 15 other disabled ‘veterans’. They sleep on the street and spend their days smoking marijuana and drinking.
Back home in the village, before he was taken, Akoi lived with his mother, two sisters, a brother and grandfather, his mother’s father, who died when Akoi turned 12, the year before he was kidnapped.
Akoi’s grandfather was a zo, a medicine man. His name was Kemah. In Liberia, zos are highly trained specialists with advanced degrees of expertise, analogous to Western post-doctoral degrees or medical specializations. For example, there are Bone Setters, Snake Zos (who have a special relationship with poisonous snakes and can cure snake bites), and Mortuary Zos whose job it is to properly prepare and bury the dead. If a person dies far from home or from the place they are to be buried, it is the job of the Mortuary Zo to walk the dead home and into their grave, it being common knowledge that with the right guidance, the dead will easily get up and walk to wherever they need to go. (A friend who is now in her 30’s, remembers her grandfather’s death very clearly, when she was a young child of about three. He would come once a month to visit her grandmother and spend the night. My friend and others in the family could tell he was there by the overpowering stench, and she remembers seeing footprints walking across the woven ceiling mat.)
Then there is the story of the Swedish NGO that equipped several villages with a forge and metal-smithing tools, with the intention of helping people make and repair farm implements. The donated equipment rusted, unused. What the Swedes didn’t know was that only Surgical Zos are allowed to do metal smithing and that even farm implements had to be ritually made by the rightful people. Akoi says that his grandfather was a big zo, one who helped with babies and who could counteract witchcraft.
Akoi’s grandfather was 98 when he died shortly before Akoi was taken into the war. That means that his grandfather was born at approximately the turn of the century, at around 1800, and grew up before Liberia had been colonized by returning slaves from America. He would have been a young man, about Akoi’s age now, when the first ships came to Liberia bearing Black Christians who arrived in the sweltering equatorial heat in corsets and long woolen dresses, top hats and tails, bibles in hand.
Akoi’s grandfather was a storyteller. Before dying he instructed the family that he wanted Akoi to sleep in his bedroom so that his spirit would be with him. That’s how Akoi came to have his own room until the war came. Akoi takes a photograph of a man in a hammock because it reminds him of his grandfather, who spent his last years, old and frail, lying in a hammock in his bedroom in the cool interior of their earthen house. Whenever he passed through his grandfather’s room, the old man would say, “Akoi, bring me something to eat, bring me something to drink.” Akoi brought him food, and lay next to him in the hammock, swinging and rocking, as his grandfather peeled off stories and set them adrift in the moist afternoon. He explained how elephants used to come when the children were very small, disturbing the village by eating the crops on their farm, and how, after they had eaten, they would run away from the farm again back into the forest.
Spider used to act greedy. It was a time people were having a feast. Spider promised the people in one village that his troop would sing for them at their feast. And he told people in the other village the same thing. He said he would stay between them. Then the spider tied a rope around his waist, and said that when the food was ready they should pull the rope and haul him to the village. Both villages started pulling on the rope at the same time. That’s why spider has such a small waist, so tiny.
After his father left them, when Akoi was ten, he made the farm that fed the whole family. He climbed coco palms to harvest coconuts. “I was small,” he says, “but I tried my possible best. I was very hard-headed. Too hard-headed.”
There is a rumpled flap of skin where the ‘hard-headed’ top of his skull used to be. Akoi says that at the time of his injury, if you held your open hand over the top of his head you could feel his breath on your palm. He says now that when he looks in the mirror and wonders why his life was spared, he thinks, “If God left me there it must be for a purpose. It is not like God loves us more than others who have died; it is the method of God to bring us together to love each other.”
It was March, 3, 2003. Akoi says that the morning of the attack, he was in the communication room. He says he didn’t feel like fighting that day, but they were under attack and he had to go try to radio for help, since he was in charge of communications. He had learned from his first commander, Sea Never Dry, to be a communicator. When they brought ammunition to the base headquarters, Akoi would unpack it, take inventory and make a record of everything. His commander decided to train him as a communicator. In one week, he learned all the code numbers and code words, and had his own radio. His fighting name was Boy Blue.
The day of the attack, government troops surrounded them and attacked at 5 in the morning. His commander that day was Chief Combat. After the communication room was hit, he ordered Akoi and a few others to run for the car to go rescue those that were trapped. When they got into the artillery car, a heavy weapons car, a rocket propelled grenade sliced through the top of Akoi’s head, splitting it open like a pumpkin. He dropped to the floor of the car and everyone thought he was dead. They brought him back to the base and laid him out on the floor. Someone took a photo: Boy Blue is lying on his back on a blue plastic tarp, with several teenage boys kneeling beside him. A short distance away, there is something that looks like a small dish with a pile of glistening raw meat. It is the top of his skull and half his brain. His commander puts the piece of skull with the brains back on Akoi’s head and ties it on with a piece of string. They put him in a car and drive to Guinea. If he dies on the highway, they will bury him by the side of the road. He spends two days in a border town in a coma. On the third day he awakens to find himself lying in the middle of a hospital room with fifteen other patients. When he opens his eyes, he asks why he is there. The boy lying next to him says, “You are wounded.” Boy Blue can’t move his body. He can only cry.
They drive him back into Liberia, to the town of Voinjama and take him to what’s left of the hospital. Someone goes looking for Akoi’s mother. They know where she is hiding in the bush. They tell her that her son is badly wounded and bring her to see him. She tells him, “I don’t think, Akoi, that I will ever see you again.” People tell her, “Don’t cry. Depend on God. God will help. When they brought him here he was not talking, not opening his eyes to see people, and now he can see and say, ‘Oh, my Mother.’” The soldiers send for another car to take him back to Guinea, to the capital, Conakry. His mother begs to go with him because she knows she is the only one who can care for him properly. She says, “If he dies, I will be able to see where he’s buried.” But they tell her, “No. This car is only for critically wounded soldiers”. He is 14 and he’s been fighting for 2 years, ever since he was kidnapped from his village by the people trying to save him now.
She wants to cook for him. She insists on cooking for him, knowing that it will be his last meal. They wait for her to cook the meal. She returns to the hospital with his favorite dish. She wakes him up and holds him in her arms to feed him, but he is unable to eat, so she sits by his bed and weeps. They weep together as he drifts in and out of consciousness.
They put him in the car and drive nonstop for 21 hours. When they arrive at the hospital in Conakry, a French doctor unwraps the bandages from Akoi’s head, and weeps. The wound is festering and has begun to smell. Akoi undergoes more than a dozen surgeries. After a time he can sit up, but he is paralyzed on one side and confined to a wheelchair. Someone took another photo. A small teenage boy in white diapers stares without expression at the camera. He cannot bathe, dress or feed himself. He watches television with the other patients, and wishes he were dead. He forces himself to learn to walk with a stick, saying, “God will make a way for me.” The war ends in June, 2003, two months after he is wounded. On July 27, he is discharged from the hospital. They give him a plastic bag with two shirts, two pairs of trousers, and the doctor’s name and address on a piece of paper that got lost on the way home.
When he returns to Voinjama, his mother is overjoyed. She has been taken by LURD rebels, his sisters have been taken by government troops and are in a refugee camp. His mother begins to search for food in the bush, a little to eat, a little to sell. The heat and the strain cause the top of her skull to separate, a serious and usually fatal illness. She survives but has a nervous breakdown and never fully recovers. Her face is permanently contorted and her speech is slurred. Akoi says, “After that, her mind is so disturbed, not settled.”
During the disarmament, the U.N. gives Akoi $150, half of the total payment he will receive for turning in his gun. He gives his mother $50 for medical treatment, sends $75 to his sisters in the camp and uses the last $25 to go see them and beg them to come take their mother to the camp in hopes she can receive medical attention there. The sisters and the mother stay in the camp until repatriation. In 2004 the UN gives him money and he goes back to school, but in 2006 the program ends. Because he is paralyzed on one side, he cannot do any physical work to support himself so he bands together with 15 other disabled ‘veterans’. They sleep on the street and spend their days smoking marijuana and drinking.
Back home in the village, before he was taken, Akoi lived with his mother, two sisters, a brother and grandfather, his mother’s father, who died when Akoi turned 12, the year before he was kidnapped.
Akoi’s grandfather was a zo, a medicine man. His name was Kemah. In Liberia, zos are highly trained specialists with advanced degrees of expertise, analogous to Western post-doctoral degrees or medical specializations. For example, there are Bone Setters, Snake Zos (who have a special relationship with poisonous snakes and can cure snake bites), and Mortuary Zos whose job it is to properly prepare and bury the dead. If a person dies far from home or from the place they are to be buried, it is the job of the Mortuary Zo to walk the dead home and into their grave, it being common knowledge that with the right guidance, the dead will easily get up and walk to wherever they need to go. (A friend who is now in her 30’s, remembers her grandfather’s death very clearly, when she was a young child of about three. He would come once a month to visit her grandmother and spend the night. My friend and others in the family could tell he was there by the overpowering stench, and she remembers seeing footprints walking across the woven ceiling mat.)
Then there is the story of the Swedish NGO that equipped several villages with a forge and metal-smithing tools, with the intention of helping people make and repair farm implements. The donated equipment rusted, unused. What the Swedes didn’t know was that only Surgical Zos are allowed to do metal smithing and that even farm implements had to be ritually made by the rightful people. Akoi says that his grandfather was a big zo, one who helped with babies and who could counteract witchcraft.
Akoi’s grandfather was 98 when he died shortly before Akoi was taken into the war. That means that his grandfather was born at approximately the turn of the century, at around 1800, and grew up before Liberia had been colonized by returning slaves from America. He would have been a young man, about Akoi’s age now, when the first ships came to Liberia bearing Black Christians who arrived in the sweltering equatorial heat in corsets and long woolen dresses, top hats and tails, bibles in hand.
Akoi’s grandfather was a storyteller. Before dying he instructed the family that he wanted Akoi to sleep in his bedroom so that his spirit would be with him. That’s how Akoi came to have his own room until the war came. Akoi takes a photograph of a man in a hammock because it reminds him of his grandfather, who spent his last years, old and frail, lying in a hammock in his bedroom in the cool interior of their earthen house. Whenever he passed through his grandfather’s room, the old man would say, “Akoi, bring me something to eat, bring me something to drink.” Akoi brought him food, and lay next to him in the hammock, swinging and rocking, as his grandfather peeled off stories and set them adrift in the moist afternoon. He explained how elephants used to come when the children were very small, disturbing the village by eating the crops on their farm, and how, after they had eaten, they would run away from the farm again back into the forest.
Spider used to act greedy. It was a time people were having a feast. Spider promised the people in one village that his troop would sing for them at their feast. And he told people in the other village the same thing. He said he would stay between them. Then the spider tied a rope around his waist, and said that when the food was ready they should pull the rope and haul him to the village. Both villages started pulling on the rope at the same time. That’s why spider has such a small waist, so tiny.
After his father left them, when Akoi was ten, he made the farm that fed the whole family. He climbed coco palms to harvest coconuts. “I was small,” he says, “but I tried my possible best. I was very hard-headed. Too hard-headed.”
There is a rumpled flap of skin where the ‘hard-headed’ top of his skull used to be. Akoi says that at the time of his injury, if you held your open hand over the top of his head you could feel his breath on your palm. He says now that when he looks in the mirror and wonders why his life was spared, he thinks, “If God left me there it must be for a purpose. It is not like God loves us more than others who have died; it is the method of God to bring us together to love each other.”
Wednesday, April 30, 2014
OSPREY
The beach in front of the house I am living in has wide, powdery sand, and piles of driftwood – whole trees with their long, sodden trunks and intact root balls. The side branches are gone, broken off along the river bottom and in the churning waves. On rainy days, the dog and I get wet. On sunny days we walk to where the river empties into the sea, just north of the astonishing McKerricher State Park, an anomalous, sudden, undulating stretch of sand dunes along the beach. There is a spot just below the bridge where the river empties into the sea. At low tide, you can walk up the river, picking your way along exposed water-rippled sand and slippery moss-covered stones. Sometimes there are sea lions that look like stumps when they bask in the sun. Sometimes you see their noses break the surface, sending tiny wavelets toward the river’s edge that merge with the pull of a rising or falling tide.
Ospreys are teaching their young to hunt. Before they dive, they hover, usually at the mouth of the river, motionless in the brisk wind, flicking the edges of their wings, tilting their fan-shaped tail, then plunging into the shallowest water, into the thin white foam, lifting out a tiny, squirming silver fish. Salmon fry? Not yet, though conservationists are working to restore the spawning habitat of this estuary. There are tufts of native grasses and sedges along the briny tidal zone, and gravel beaches farther up where fallen alders and willows create protected pools for eggs. There is a taciturn, old male osprey that often sits on the railing of the 10 Mile Bridge, surveying up river and down. Sometimes a kingfisher joins him.
Even at high tide, the beach is walkable. I have fallen in love, and the conversation is deepening into intimacy. Love takes many forms, I think, including the love of rivers, beaches and Ospreys. When I see the birds, I say, “I love you!” in response to their high, shrill, staccato cries. I watch their slow, leisurely circling overhead, their outstretched wings backlit and finely etched in white and dark brown. Love is seeing a beach littered with sand dollars. It is seeing my feet in the clear, icy water, the water so clean that I know how seldom I’ve been in water this clear, or known its smell. I think of the radiation from Fukushima that is surely in it. I greet the ocean, saying, “I love you! Hello! I love you!”
Sometimes I must step away and into the relief of being indoors, or I must close my eyes and be grateful for silence – again silence - because sometimes these trees and this ocean are too massive. The trees especially seem too green, too complex with too much life in and beneath and among them, and there are too many trees and at the same time never enough, because so many, many have already been cut and it’s unbearable, like losing all the lovers of all the lifetimes. The past two days there have been thunderstorms with howling wind and lashing rain, and only the dog and the leaking skylights keep my pounding heart from getting up and running away to join everything that is rampaging.
One day, after one of those spring storms, with everything washed clean, I drive from town to the beach with the dog. As I come down the grade after the bridge, the Sentry Osprey suddenly swoops across the road and comes to land on a nearby post, his outstretched wings suddenly looming huge in front of my windshield and in my peripheral view, the enormous, fleeting shadow momentarily eclipsing the road and the sun. At that moment, a beat up car pulls over across the road and a disheveled man hurriedly gets out. Waving his arms, he shouts to me, “Did you see that osprey, the way he swooped down and landed on that post?” The man flaps his arms again and makes the sound of a man imitating the sound of a bird’s wings flapping. “Yes,” I say. “Yes, I saw it!” My own heart is still pounding with the thrill and shock of it, so close. The man shakes his head in wonderment, and says, in a loud, ringing voice, “I’ve driven this road for 20 years!” He gets back in his car and drives away. He just had to pull over and stop his car to say to a stranger, “Did you see that bird?”
Ospreys are teaching their young to hunt. Before they dive, they hover, usually at the mouth of the river, motionless in the brisk wind, flicking the edges of their wings, tilting their fan-shaped tail, then plunging into the shallowest water, into the thin white foam, lifting out a tiny, squirming silver fish. Salmon fry? Not yet, though conservationists are working to restore the spawning habitat of this estuary. There are tufts of native grasses and sedges along the briny tidal zone, and gravel beaches farther up where fallen alders and willows create protected pools for eggs. There is a taciturn, old male osprey that often sits on the railing of the 10 Mile Bridge, surveying up river and down. Sometimes a kingfisher joins him.
Even at high tide, the beach is walkable. I have fallen in love, and the conversation is deepening into intimacy. Love takes many forms, I think, including the love of rivers, beaches and Ospreys. When I see the birds, I say, “I love you!” in response to their high, shrill, staccato cries. I watch their slow, leisurely circling overhead, their outstretched wings backlit and finely etched in white and dark brown. Love is seeing a beach littered with sand dollars. It is seeing my feet in the clear, icy water, the water so clean that I know how seldom I’ve been in water this clear, or known its smell. I think of the radiation from Fukushima that is surely in it. I greet the ocean, saying, “I love you! Hello! I love you!”
Sometimes I must step away and into the relief of being indoors, or I must close my eyes and be grateful for silence – again silence - because sometimes these trees and this ocean are too massive. The trees especially seem too green, too complex with too much life in and beneath and among them, and there are too many trees and at the same time never enough, because so many, many have already been cut and it’s unbearable, like losing all the lovers of all the lifetimes. The past two days there have been thunderstorms with howling wind and lashing rain, and only the dog and the leaking skylights keep my pounding heart from getting up and running away to join everything that is rampaging.
One day, after one of those spring storms, with everything washed clean, I drive from town to the beach with the dog. As I come down the grade after the bridge, the Sentry Osprey suddenly swoops across the road and comes to land on a nearby post, his outstretched wings suddenly looming huge in front of my windshield and in my peripheral view, the enormous, fleeting shadow momentarily eclipsing the road and the sun. At that moment, a beat up car pulls over across the road and a disheveled man hurriedly gets out. Waving his arms, he shouts to me, “Did you see that osprey, the way he swooped down and landed on that post?” The man flaps his arms again and makes the sound of a man imitating the sound of a bird’s wings flapping. “Yes,” I say. “Yes, I saw it!” My own heart is still pounding with the thrill and shock of it, so close. The man shakes his head in wonderment, and says, in a loud, ringing voice, “I’ve driven this road for 20 years!” He gets back in his car and drives away. He just had to pull over and stop his car to say to a stranger, “Did you see that bird?”
Monday, April 21, 2014
BITS AND PIECES #1
It is significant,
startling, that animals, plants, stones, water, birds and even
micro-organisms remain friendly, neutral, even overtly benign and
inviting of (re)relationship in spite of our unrelenting brutality.
This inexplicable open-ness is less a charming quirk than a simple
fact of character: it is in the nature of most beings (humans
included) to seek relationship, to express love and receive it.
Remarkably, this has not evolved out of the non-humans. One wonders
whether Nature is curious to see whether humans will remember or even
recognize this connectedness and choose it.
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