caring enlarges us
the pandemic shone light
on on our human need for binding ties,
we need connection with the other,
to validate us, to reassure us we're not alone,
to help us fit ourselves into larger wholes
to escape the loneliness that can be our ego,
our prison, until our heart reaches out,
and we care,
the screen was a pale substitute for flesh-and-blood realness,
many of us re-found relationship with plants,
for, with them, we don't share contagion,
and they are cousins to us,
even more the animal world called us,
particularly with the pets
who enlarge our families,
and are even closer to us as family than the plants,
I talked last evening with a high school senior,
who, in Covid Time, found opportunity to help a neighbor with her sheep,
and he found himself transformed by relationship to them,
he learned their world, transfixed by difference and similarity,
by the wonder that each life breathes in and exhales out
with every moment of their being,
he became so committed to ram and ewe and lamb,
with each moment of their lives,
and thus with his friend's world
that she gave him her Shetland sheep in her will,
and he is able to maintain that sense
of rightness in the world after her passing,
his face transforms in his eloquence about his new reality,
a connection such as we all need to other life,
to a larger self that calls to us,
that calls us to care,
and thus we are much the better
when we answer that calling with our full self.
by Henry H. Walker
March 9, ‘25
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