Flowers in the Desert
Why is today’s blog post late? Well I had to take care of some details in my office, then spent several hours cleaning cat cages and feeding cats and kittens at our cat rescue (plus chasing and trying to catch escapee kittens), then I picked up another kitten from the vets, then I gave de-worming medication to five other kittens, then I poured a shot of whiskey…now I can think and write.
Why do I sometimes spend so much time helping unwanted cats and kittens? Why did I weep for two days over a sick kitten who died after we had it only three days? I think it’s because of flowers in the desert.
The western desert in the USA is not a place you would expect to find flowers. Everything is exposed with no chance of finding shade while the sun beats down mercilessly. It is bone dry and remains so for months on end. The ground is dry, stony, very alkaline, and contains virtually no nutrients. Yet, there are plants. One sees small scrubby bushes scattered around, and low to the ground sprout various small and very tough plants. Then, here and there, are flowers. You stand there in 110 degrees heat in a vast dry desert and there is a small yellow or purple flower springing up from the stony soil. A glorious tiny patch of color. Life, beautiful and unstoppable. What an absolute treasure is each one of those tiny flowers. What a lesson we can apply to that insistence on blossoming in even the worst environments.
That is, to me, the insistence of life. It is not just that living things insist on surviving, but that life insists on thriving. Look at the opposite end of the spectrum: rain forests. The biomass in an acre of rain forest is insanely high. The species diversity is almost off the scale. Life, given sufficient sun, water, and soil, thrives magnificently.
Then there is man. With us it is the insistence of death. We bulldoze rainforests into nothing to build on the land. We clear-cut entire forests for lumber to sell. We will slaughter an animal into extinction if its feathers, or fur, or horn, or whatever part has commercial value. Declare an animal a varmint, and it is killed en masse simply due to its alleged economic impact. Farm animals are stuffed by the thousands, tens of thousands, into cages inside sheds in order to maximize profit. Pets breed, and their unwanted offspring are tied in bags and thrown into rivers, or dumped in an empty lot, or, to assuage guilt, dumped at a shelter. The pets themselves get dumped at the shelter because they don’t behave, or are too much work, or because people are too fucking lazy to find a landlord who accepts pets. We step on plants, pick plants, spray herbicides on plants, burn plants, or just indifferently hack the flowers off plants.
We place absolutely no value on life except for its convenience or its commodity value.
Not all of us. Some of us have seen the flower in the desert. We learn to admire and love a living thing, any living thing, for its insistence on living and thriving. The lover of life won’t step on that flower, or spray it, or even pick it. This becomes true for all life. It is valued. Thus, the unwanted cats and kittens are worth spending time and resources on. Watch them, even in cages they are trying their best to live some sort of life. Even the sick kitten who we had for three days had struggled and insisted on life for two hard months. We gave it three fun, love filled days at home. It was happy. We mourned the loss of the insistence of life, the spirit of life which that kitten exemplified. We mourned for the kitten, itself a flower in the desert forever lost, and the desert is now just a little less colorful.
