Animals Are People Too

A Safe Place for Animals: Squirrel Sanctuary in England
If only I could so live and so serve the world
that after me there should never again be birds in cages.
~Isak Dinesen (aka Karen Blixen)
Danish author (1885 - 1962)

How can you be sure it has a soul? she said.
You can't, I said, unless you've got one yourself.
~Brian Andreas, StoryPeople
Like St. Francis of Assisi and Beatrix Potter, Opal Whiteley was devoted to animals. All of her pets were grandly named: Elizabeth Barrett Browning was the cow; Peter Paul Rubens was the pig. Opal wrote in her diary:

So many little people live in the woods.
I do have conversations with them.

When the cornflowers
grow in the fields
I do pick them up,
and make a chain of flowers
for Shakespeare's neck.
Then I do talk to him
about the one he was named for.
He is such a beautiful grey horse
and his ways are ways of gentleness.
Too, he does have likings
like the likings I have
for the blue hills beyond the fields.

Today there was greyness everywhere--
grey clouds in the sky
and grey shadows
above the canyon.
And all the voices were grey
And Felix Mendelssohn* was grey
and down the road I did meet a grey horse--
and his greyness was like the greyness
of William Shakespeare.

[*Mendelssohn was her pet mouse;
another mouse was named Mozart]

Euripedes [pet lamb]
did follow after me.
He does follow me
manywheres I go.
I looked for fleurs
that I had longs to see.
I lay my ear close to the ground
where the grasses grew close together.
I did listen.
There were voices from out the earth
and the things of their saying
were the gladness of growing. . . .
All the grasses growing there . . .
from the tips of their green arms
to their toe roots in the ground.

~Opal Whiteley
from her childhood diary
(pp 4, 20, 59, 116,)

SEE LATEST FORTNIGHTLY POST:
"OPAL: IN LOVE WITH THE WORLD"
ON MY LITERARY BLOG OF CONNECTION & COINCIDENCE
THE FORTNIGHTLY KITTI CARRIKER

AND NEW POST:
"ABOUT OPAL WHITELEY"
ON MY BOOK BLOG
KITTI'S BOOK LIST

Courage

Sam and Karen Riding the Steel Hawg at Indiana Beach
July 2008 (photograph by Ben McCartney)
COURAGE
Courage is the price that
Life exacts for granting peace.

The soul that knows it not
Knows no release from little things:
Knows not the livid loneliness of fear,
Nor mountain heights where bitter joy
can hear the sound of wings.

Nor can life grant us boon of living, compensate
For dull gray ugliness and pregnant hate
Unless we dare
The soul's dominion.
Each time we make a choice, we pay
With courage to behold the restless day,
And count it fair.

poem by Amelia Earhart,
record - setting American aviation pioneer and author
(b. 1897 - declared dead in 1939, after
disappearing over the Pacific in 1937)

Earhart was the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic and receive the Distinguished Flying Cross; she joined the renowned aviation program at Purdue University in 1935 as a visiting faculty member, advisor to aeronautical engineering, and career counselor to women students

*****
I can't imagine what it would be like to be as brave as Amelia!

Remember what Helen Keller said:
"Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run
than outright exposure. The fearful are caught
as often as the bold."

But I've never felt so sure about that.

Then there is this motto from Isak Dinesen
(and others before and after her):
"Be bold, but not too bold."

Okay, time to screw my courage to the sticking - place . . .

P.S. ~ February 2018
Shared by Pastor Lana J. Robyne
Co-Director at Purdue Wesley Foundation

“I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. I felt fear more times than I can remember, but I hid it, a mask of boldness. The brave (person) is not (one) who does not feel afraid, but (one) who conquers that fear.”
~ Archbishop Desmond Tutu ~

Up, Always Up!

Gilded Bronze Statue by French Sculptor, Emmanuel Fremiet
Created in Paris, 1874; erected in Philadelphia, 1890

Many Halloweens ago, a dear friend sent me the following passage, and every year around this time (All Hallows, All Saints, All Souls) I like to get it out and pass it around. Not to accidentally set off some endless discourse on virginity or angels or witchcraft (!) but in celebration of creativity and daring and emancipation:

". . . in the early days of what we called then the 'emancipation of woman' . . . Many strange things took place . . . the young women of the highest intelligence, and the most daring and ingenious of them, coming out of the chiaroscuro of a thousand years, blinking at the sun and wild with desire to try their wings.

"I believe that some of them put on the armor and the halo of St. Joan of Arc, who was herself an emancipated virgin, and became like white - hot angels. But most women, when they feel free to experiment with life, will go straight to the witches' Sabbath. I myself respect them for it, and do not think that I could ever really love a woman who had not, at some time or other, been up on a broomstick."

from "The Old Chevalier"
a short story found in Seven Gothic Tales
by Danish author Isak Dinesen (1885 - 1962)

Thanks goodness / goddess for our broomsticks! I know I'm always up on mine. Thanks for loving me just the same. xoxo