“We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.”
Henry Beston
Lots in this…. the sense of sacred, so much absent in our cultures; the sense of ‘other, not lesser’; the sense of the wisdom and medicine in that otherness – what it might offer and teach us, in terms of restoration from our destructive, solipsistic, ego-driven human perspectives into much-needed reconnection with our deeper embodied selves and the natural world….ultimately a sense of underlying connection, oneness, the web of life: ‘…caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.”
The writer suspects that how we treat animals and how we treat children are the great, invisible rights issues of our time, which will have our descendants scratching their heads in wonder and dismay.
Palace Gate Counselling Service, Exeter
Counselling in Exeter since 1994
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