September 10, 2003

• Animal Sacrifices

  
  

  The stars hung beautiful and bright in the sky over Indiana this morning about 5:00.  My little dog woke me so I took her outside while every thing was still quiet.  Heavy dew bends the grass and a chill embraces the stone walk.  I went barefoot to my bench. 

  
  

  It's too early for normal birds, although from down the hill I can hear a rooster crow.  Silly bird - the sun is at least an hour away from sending it's first pink rays through the tree tops, but this diligent fellow is doing his part to make sure it wakes on time. 

  
  

  I start by lying back on the bench and finding constellations.  Some day I'd like to take an astronomy course to learn more about the heavens above.  For now, I'm happy that I can locate Orion's belt.  I always start there picking out the stars that are familiar and wondering how other peoples and cultures have mapped the stars in ways that may now be lost to us forever.  People and nations and Empires are less than blinks in the eyes of the stars, but to us with our tiny lives the stars are permanent fixtures.

  
  

  Have you ever wondered about the way that stars hurtle through time and space?  Scientists tell us that the stars above have their own life cycles.  They are moving and growing and dying and birthing new stars.  But to my eye, the stars are not discernibly any different than they were to my grandfather, or to his grandfather before. 

  
  

  Temporal perspective captures my imagination.  Relative to stars, our life spans are so short that our focus enables us to see, study, and understand an infinitesimal unit of cosmological time.  We fret that we can't access the perspective of the universe who's clock ticks in light years.  If only we could just see whether our theories do apply across the galactic ages. 

  
  

  On my way back into the house, I forget to step over the altar stone.  I don't know why they do this, but my cats have made it a point of nightly ritual to eviscerate a mouse on this partiuclar stone.  Every night for almost four years, they have brought their victims to this place eating the flesh but leaving the organs for me to discover in the morning - rather like the ancient Hebrew animal sacrifices.  These feline priestesses take great care to make certain that livers and hearts are there each morning for the sun to see and to know that they continue their liturgy of devotion.

  
  

  The lives of mice are so tiny compared to my own, I wonder if I'm like a star to them?  I experience my life in a rush through the heavens, busy, fretting, worrying, laughing, crying, and seeming never to step into the same river twice.  To the mouse, I must seem never to change at all.  Hundreds of generations of mice have come and gone since I moved here - so many generations that I think that the empty field which was before my family came, is not even a distant racial memory to them.  To the mice, there has always been a big white house at the top of the hill. 

  
  

  Now I have the blood and flesh of the mouse du jour on my feet and it doesn't gross me out.  It feels like the appropriate response that I bring - goddess immortal and awesome - to acknowledge the sacrifice of my worshipful subjects. 

  
  

  This is true until I walk through the door of my house, then I rock back on my heels so the gory toes don't touch the carpet and I hobble straight to the bathroom for soap and water. 

  • 7:51 am
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