Life and a dead squirrel

You’ll care more about a dead squirrel in your front yard than people dying in Africa, he said. But he was wrong.

A dead squirrel under the tree across the street from the author’s front porch.

I stood on my front porch as flurries fell in the early morning, staring across the street in the dark at a dead squirrel under the tree in my neighbors yard, waiting for my old dog to decide to join me for a walk. The squirrel had died almost two weeks ago, but it was cold then and she had frozen under the snow. Then it got warm and she changed from a serene slumber to a grotesquely bloated blob. Soon, she will be part of the earth and then, gone.

My dog is very old and will soon die. I will also soon die. We will both also eventually be gone.

I thought about birds and cows and how each of these creatures decide they don’t want to die, that they fight against the dying of the light, at how each of their lives have been decided by human experts who want to feel better about killing animals to not be a choice, but an instinct. Animals that aren’t human don’t make choices, we’re told, they live by instinct.

Only I know my dog decides when she wants to go on a walk. I know she chooses which direction to go, where to sniff, whether or not she wants me to scratch her ears. I know she chooses which other dogs and humans and bovines and felines she likes and who she won’t be friends with. It stretches credulity to believe these things are mere instinct.

I don’t know what powers each of us, from the smallest spider to the biggest human. We each have a life source that doesn’t need batteries that’s powered by what the earth provides in water and air and nutrients that also regenerates. We gather data from our senses and know the color blue is magnificent without knowing why, but some of us spend our entire lives trying to figure it out, knowing in our hearts we will never really know. We don’t need to reboot or recharge and only have one dead state from which we don’t recover.

We don’t need data crammed into us to understand the world around us. Our intelligences are not artificial but are interconnected with every other part of nature and every other life, and it powers our own whether or not we are aware.

Like how the dead squirrel is pulling at me from the front as I wait for my old dog to push her nose through the screen door behind me. I can feel her getting up from the sofa as I write this, as you can as you read it. These few words connect us together, maybe for a few seconds, perhaps for the rest of our lives whenever each of us thinks about a dead squirrel or an old dog.

We are in a constant state of powered up, from the first breath to the last, every day in between, even when we sleep. Staring out through the falling snow, into the pre-dawn darkness at the dead squirrel I couldn’t see but knew was there, its waning force I could feel in my own soul, I thought about all these lives all at once, those billions and billions of lives all cranking away because of a force we knew was powering them but don’t really understand, and the millions dying off the same time millions were raging into being with their first breath or intake of whatever gives them life, it was all too overwhelming and I felt tears leak out of my eyes and freeze to my cheeks.

I do care about people dying in Africa. I do care about the dead squirrel across the street in my neighbor’s front yard. I care about each equally as they were each drawn from the same life force that we all share.