On my list

Come over and check out this lovely post that is a book review, but oh my, what a book.
Click here for the blog: On Animals and the Human Spirit

Terri Windling's blog "Myth & Moor" has beautiful thoughts and imagery.  And her review of the book Zoologies: On Animals and the Human Spirit by Alison Hawthorne Deming, included this quote:

Deming discusses elephants and ants, pigs and oyster, and the animal nature of human beings. "I am tired," she writes, "of the conventional palette with which the lives of animals are painted. Most renderings feel too saturated with gratuitous piety, weighted down by ceaseless elegy, or boastful about heroic encounters on the last islands of wilderness. I want something closer to the marrow of our lived days, as in childhood, when an animal story or encounter could make me wonderstruck."

Windling also posts images this time of her dear companion dog, Spencer.  The next day she focused on Fairy Tales and wonderful art images.  Do look every once in a while to see what she's sharing.

It took me a night or two before it sunk in, how few animals have encounters with human children, or vice versa, these days.

Pets become our dear friends, where their own personalities can be expressed.

How important it is to be quiet when walking in the woods (preferably without a dog) so that you might just chance upon a real live creature of the woods.  Our children are chatter boxes.  They also live in a life of boxes...homes, schools, SUV's and techno-boxes.  No live creatures to cause wonder there.

And pul-eeze don't tell me the entertainment at an amusement park with doll-like animals can inspire the same awe as rounding a corner and looking into a deer's huge liquid eyes.

Nor can going to the best zoo, where animals may be treated humanely (what's wrong with that phrase!) but they know they have very few choices like they would have in their natural habitat.  That's animal jail, folks.  Don't you want to go visit the inmates in a human jail?

I hope you enjoy Windling's blog, and I think I'm going to be reading the book by Demming.