More Cute Crane Photos

Yesterday as my neighbor and I walked, she asked me if I believed in reincarnation. In a way that is a strange question when she knows that I am a practicing Catholic, but maybe she realizes I'm practicing because I'm not that good at it. I have probably dropped hints along the way that I am the World's Worst Catholic. So I was telling her the story of how I was a black panther and a poacher killed me, and then it occurred to me - he was an incompetent poacher! I can't say for sure, but I suspect he thought he would get more money for a rare black panther than a regular leopard, but when he tried to sell me to the head of the poaching operation, the guy told him a regular leopard is worth more because people like the spotted pelt, but nobody would pay for a black pelt. They did take my teeth and claws and were making some kind of jewelry out of them, so there's that, but it figures that I would get murdered by a guy who didn't even know what he was doing.

Today I took a furlough day from work, and we got the boat, but the motor wouldn't start. I hate when that happens. We did have fun seeing the crane family again, and then another one with two little babies. It seems like they always start with two, but usually they lose one, and one year they lost both. I think the family with the slightly older chick are newer, and one of them might be the offspring of the couple with the two tiny chicks, who have been around for years.

Have you ever seen a baby dinosaur cleaning itself? Aww!

Here it is with both parents.

And here is the family with two babies.

Sadly, one of these babies will probably not survive. But they sure are cute now!

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Prayers for Poachers

The last couple of days I have been thinking about poaching a lot. It seems like a very simple thing: poaching is bad. Then I think of my ancestors during the Ice Age who were starving, and I realize they didn’t have the luxury of sparing wooly mammoths to make sure there were enough to continue a population; they just needed to eat. It’s easy to criticize them from my well-fed vantage point. Sure, I’d love to see a wooly mammoth, but how much would they have loved to eat a Big Mac? Some poaching really is like that, and people engage in it just to survive. Can I judge them for that? A lot of poaching, however, is about greed and not survival. We can probably all agree that this is a brutal practice, killing rare animals for a single body part, but the people engaging in this practice are still humans with immortal souls, so we should pray for them. They often murder other humans too, so their souls are in real danger of damnation.

I like hypothetical situations, so here is one for you: imagine you are the spirit of an animal just killed by a poacher. You realize the poacher did not kill you out of necessity, so he seems very evil to you. Then you follow him to a poaching operation headquarters, where he gets into an argument over money with the head of the operation. Imagine he kills the other man. You, as the animal’s spirit, might sympathize with the killed man and hate the killer, because he killed you too. However, the killed man is also guilty because he created the operation that drew in the poacher. Both men would need prayers for their souls. Now consider that this is probably not a hypothetical situation but something that happens all the time, and you can see how prayers are desperately needed. (The animal’s perspective, that’s a long story, but many of my readers understand.) Greed is a deadly sin that can lead to destruction of God’s beautiful creation and even the murder of another human being. We should pray that the hearts of all poachers would be turned back to God, and that He would have mercy on the souls of the poachers who have already died. So as you are thinking of prayer intentions, I’d ask you to consider this one at least once a month. Thanks!

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Have You Seen This Movie?

Has anyone out there in the blogosphere seen the following movie?

In the first gray light of an African dawn, a hunter shoots a black panther and throws her body into the back of his jeep. Her soul ignores a powerful force trying to pull her away, and instead she follows the hunter to a cement building in the middle of the jungle, with a wide door on one side that the jeep drives into. The driver of the jeep tosses the panther's body to some waiting young men dressed only in white loinclothes, while the hunter draws aside a velvet drape and steps into a room where a corpulent man wearing a tall hat greets him with disdain. The hunter (who is the only white person involved in this story) and the other man clearly cannot agree on the amount of money the panther is worth; the hunter wants more than for a usual leopard, since black panthers are rarer, but the other man points out that the skin is worth less. The panther's spirit leaves this small, luxurious room and goes back to the large warehouse area full of hides and horns and tusks. She sees her body lying on a table, staring lifelessly at nothing, while her teeth and claws have already been fashioned into a necklace and two bracelets. Finally she allows the force that has been tugging at her to call her to a place where there is no time, and the light is so bright that it seems dark.

The spirit has an argument with a being which is one and yet more than one: she does not want to be a human, but the being says she is an old soul and must be human to achieve the next level. (This is not in words, but in pure ideas.) Finally the soul says she will be human on the condition that she does not forget, because she does not want to be destructive like the other humans, and she only wants to be human once so she'd better achieve enlightenment in one lifetime. The other being says she does not realize what she is asking for, but she is granted her conditions and is born a human.

This is the earliest memory I have. A lot of the hunter/fat guy interaction didn't make sense to me until much later, when I pieced it together, since at the time I did not understand words. Richard Bonomo was the one who pointed out to me that the "hunter" was actually a poacher, so I was basing my idea that all humans are destructive on the actions of some people that almost everyone else would agree are deplorable. How ironic that I would hate humans based on some especially hateful humans! Of course, being a good Catholic, Rich does not believe this is an actual memory. Attempting to be a good Catholic, I have no idea what to think. (Another irony: all the Christians I have told this story to found it interesting and the only one who immediately pooh-poohed it is my New Age uncle, who believes in reincarnation... but only between humans.) Rich and Kathbert did laugh about me arguing with God, since it was so, you know, TYPICAL of me. Rich said this must have been a movie I saw as a child, so I am wondering if anyone knows what movie it is.

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