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Writer's pictureCrone

Grasping Gaia?

I feel conflicted about filming and photographing the hare - and more as you will see.


It's rather like the feeling I have about ringing birds... that there is this grasping need to know more, capture more... to turn a living process into an artifact, whether data or a photograph.


Does not the animal merit privacy as she cleans her paws? Am I not intruding and taking precious time away from grazing? How much stress is my presence causing when she may well have leverets nearby? Though I took the hare's presence as a blessing and a message, my presence would not have been that for her. It was a threat.


Today I wanted to record the mouse that I had seen in the garden. So I put out food and waited.

As I said in the video, this was a much smaller mouse than the previous day and far more wary. She would not return, whereas the other mouse, whom I just watched, came back every minute or so for another pellet or peanut. In part this is about the temperament of the individual mouse, but also, I think, about my energy as I wait. When just watching, I am present and can focus on an open heart-feeling for the mouse. When filming, I am grasping for an artifact to take away.


While I was waiting for the mouse, I realised the robin had come close.

I had not intended to film the robin, but the opportunity was there and I did.


Now I feel that I have broken an unspoken commitment to just be rather than to take. It is as though I have given my egoic need to show off (look! see how close to nature I am!) a greater priority than this tenuous relationship with a wild creature.


I looked up the symbolic meanings of the hare - and one aspect is about greed and selfishness. Another is a connection to witches, the Otherworld, lunar cycles, shapeshifting and magic. They're also related to fertility and enlightenment. (See here, here, and here.)


Of course, I liked the ideas of transformation - like my butterfly tree, magic and the Otherworld. But my feelings today park my mind in greed. My grasping need to get what I want from the more than human world.

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