Henry and I came across this bamboo grove in the San Diego Zoo during a visit back in May. Bamboo trunks have highly contrasting bark. This makes them irresistible to people wanting to carve images and messages upon them, as you can see here.
But what does this do to the bamboo? Last week, I pondered how nature’s ephemeral cruelty is bound up in the web of life. I contrasted this with the intentional death and needless destruction that too many humans can exhibit.
Today, I want to focus on our lesser, more unthinking cruelties. It seems a small thing to take a knife to one trunk in a vast bamboo forest. Yet when many of us do it, the entire forest is irrevocably altered.
We do that with each other too. One small, damaging word or phrase can cut or carve like a knife. We don’t think anything of it, but the resultant scars can irrevocably alter a person’s psychological and spiritual landscape. We might be contributing to an ongoing wounding that is then passed on to the next generation, altering the lives of an entire family or community.
In invite you to prayerfully ponder when this has happened in your life. When have you been cut by someone or carved up another person yourself? What happened, and how did you respond? Did you realize the damage right away, or did the wound take a while to ooze or bleed or scar? Has healing taken place, and how was that accomplished? What would you like to say to God or the other person about that event from your perspective today?
How might we choose differently today? Would it help to recall that we are part of a single web of life? What if we stayed silent rather than lashing out? What if we chose to pause, find a word of kindness, and offered that instead, in the hope of transforming both ourselves and the other into more beautiful beings? What if we were to fully embrace joy, even in the midst of others’ cruelty, as Kamala Harris is showing us so fiercely these days?
The smaller words on the sign above say this: “Help us create a world where all life thrives by leaving our plants pristine to be enjoyed by everyone.” How might you take this message into your own life in the days and weeks ahead?
The rampant lack of civility results in scarring people as something okay. Now in my more senior years I consciously blessing all I encounter, with a hello, a smile, a pausing presence to admire flowers, dogs, small children, send loving kindness blessing with a letter or email….
Thank you, Adeline, for making such conscious choices to bless the world and for modeling this for us! May we all find our ways to share such goodness….
Peace,
Shirin
This is perhaps my biggest challenge: “choosing differently.”
NOT to be reactive but to embrace joy and not take the bait.
Oh, Damien, I hear you. May you choose joy more and more and find the bait irrelevant…!
Peace,
Shirin
The first word that popped into my mind when I read this was “ego”. It seems that people who carve their initials, etc., into trees such as aspen (I’ve never seen a bamboo forest) must have a big ego and are ignorant and/or careless about what they’re doing to the trees. The same could apply to the human situations you talk about. It’s our ego that makes us want to be right and to point out how someone else is wrong or less than, without stopping to think about how we might actually be hurting them. If only we could tell our silly egos before we say something hurtful, that proving that we are right and they are wrong does not endear us to them!
Amen, Aston! Yes, ego seems central, and it’s a delicate balance between having a strong enough ego to care for ourselves and do our good work in the world and inflating our egos to the extent that we think others (human and more-than-human) don’t matter. May we all seek balance!
Peace,
Shirin