When Sparrow Alights by G.A. Bradshaw

[Guest guest]

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/bear-in-mind/200911/when-sparrow-alights

 

When Sparrow Alights

Truth and reconciliation with animal kin

 

 

How often has a sparrow alighted on your shoulder? Not one has done so on

mine. Yet I do notice that when a certain quiet descends within, the towhee

and wild turkey venture close, still somewhat hesitant in their jumps and

walk, but closer with less apprehension.

 

Since living in the country, my gaze increasingly moves through the windows

to the outside. Even as I write, my mind is populated by what is happening

in the surrounding woods and fields. The daily routine has taken on seasonal

rhythms, the ebb and flow of deer and birds gliding past bending branches

along pine needle floors. Suddenly, there is a change. My pulse quickens and

I sit alert when grey squirrels begin their anxious chorus then fall quiet.

Without looking, I know they sit arched and frozen seeking to blend in with

bark and bole to avoid the searching gaze of the golden eagle who circles

above. I know it is the winged one who mutes the squirrel, chatter does not

break when coyote drifts among the trees like smoke.

 

This world finds no entry to modern reality. The animals, winds, and

delicate scent <http://www.psychologytoday.com/basics/scent> of rain on

summer-made-pungent soil have no relevance in the 24/7 bustle of today's

grey survival. Sparrows find no place at airports. They land like unwanted

ornaments on artificial landscapes brightly hopping in search of dropped

crumbs or perching on stray trees hemmed in by concrete. Occasionally, the

tiny birds elicit a smile or piece of food from the waiting passenger.

Exchange is brief and the moment evaporates in the clamor of cars and

purposeful pace of the traveler. Nature is clipped into slices to fit a

weekend's backpacking trip and a patch of green fenced in by no trespassing

signs. Thoreau's sparrows find few opportunities in the brave new world.

 

What has this to do with today's woes? A poetic respite from the pain of

practical matters at hand? No, the sparrow is precisely the solution to the

violence, pollution, addictions, and

loneliness<http://www.psychologytoday.com/basics/loneliness> gripping

so many of us even while living shoulder to shoulder. After pushing nature

away for so long, humanity is now turning to embrace the earth. We have come

to realize that today's planetary ills were spawned in the void created by

the frantic rush to prove *Homo sapiens* better than any other life form.

 

Humans do not thrive in what Jungian scholar James Hillman refers to as

civilization's anorexic landscapes. Psychologists have given the symptoms a

name: " environmental deficit disorder " and in their search to bring mind and

nature into healing union, have invented a new field, ecotherapy.(1) But

when we reach out to re-kindle ties, we find that the seas have grown empty,

the forests bare, the streams lonely for the beaver, salmon, and piping

dipper—our souls weep. How can we entice the sparrow to alight?

 

Animals are remarkably open to reconciliation. Wildlife who have borne

dismissive centuries of mass killing and appropriation of homelands seem

willing to give humanity another chance. Dame Daphne Sheldrick DBE, founder

of the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, outside Nairobi, Kenya, describes

elephants' profound capacity for

forgiveness<http://www.psychologytoday.com/basics/forgiveness>

:

 

I am astounded about how forgiving they are, bearing in mind that they are

able to recollect clearly that their mother, and sometimes entire family,

have perished at the hands of humans. Our Elephants arrive wanting to kill

humans but eventually protect their human family out in the bush,

confronting a buffalo, or shielding their surrogate human family from wild,

less friendly peers. That is why I say that they are amazingly forgiving,

because there can be nothing worse in life for an Elephant than witnessing

the murder of those they love. And since Elephants never forget (which is a

fact), they demonstrate a level of forgiveness that a human would in all

likelihood have difficulty in achieving.(2)

 

Dame Daphne should know. For over fifty years, she has rescued and reared

more than eighty orphaned African elephants, pulling them back from the

brink of death and the trauma

<http://www.psychologytoday.com/basics/trauma> they

have experienced at the hands of humans.

 

Unlike reconciliation, forgiveness does not require two parties. Forgiveness

is granted by the victim and does not depend on participation by the

transgressor. However, it would be folly if humans rely on the forgiving

nature of other animals to solve environmental breakdown. Most individuals

can forfeit only so much, witness so the deaths of so many loved ones, and

bear brutality only so long. Extinction now threatens to engulf the

charismatic <http://www.psychologytoday.com/basics/charisma> elephant.

Their resilience <http://www.psychologytoday.com/basics/resilience> is

faltering.

 

More than a century of unrelenting violence and destruction has brought

elephant society to its knees. Scientists predict that elephants may

disappear in as little as 15 years. Elephant numbers have plummeted from

millions to thousands and where once they roamed the vastness of Asia and

Africa, and only tiny pockets of habitat remain.(3) Surviving pachyderms are

diagnosed with Post-traumatic Stress

Disorder<http://www.psychologytoday.com/basics/post-traumatic-stress-disorder>

(PTSD),

the symptoms of which are sometimes directed toward humans and, tragically,

to other animals. In the heat of survival, rhinoceroses have become

collateral damage as elephants struggle to withstand human appetites.

 

No, if our species is to re-discover nature in its humanity and the giant

pacific pachyderm is to be saved, animal forgiveness is not enough. As

Archbishop Desmond Tutu writes, a new future begins in the wake of

convulsive violence only when " the culprit acknowledges the wrongdoing he

has done, so letting the light and fresh air of forgiveness enter his

being. " (4) This is spirit of truth and reconciliation.

 

Science presents the truth of what is happening to the planet and why. The

next, urgent step for each of us is to accept responsibility for the

suffering borne by our forgiving animal kin and commit to the profound

personal and cultural change that reconciliation brings, so once more, the

sparrow alights.

 

1. Buzzell, L. & C. Chalquist. 2009. *Ecotherapy: Healing with Nature in

Mind*. Sierra Club.

 

2. Quoted in Bradshaw, G.A. 2009. Elephants on the edge: what animals teach

us about

humanity.<http://www.amazon.com/Elephants-Edge-Animals-Teach-Humanity/dp/0300127\

316/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8 & s=books & qid=1259608370 & sr=1-1>

New

Haven: Yale University Press.

 

3. Andrew Luck-Baker . ‘Slaughter'

fear<http://www.psychologytoday.com/basics/fear> over

poaching rise. Retrieved 6 August 2009 from

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8186773.stm

 

4. Tutu, D. 1997. *No Future Without Forgiveness*. New York: Image

Doubleday.

 

*

Gay Bradshaw, PhD, PhD is Executive Director of The Kerulos Center (**

www.kerulos.org* <http://www.kerulos.org/>*) and co-founder of the

Trans-species Institute (**www.trans-species.org*<http://www.trans-species.org/>

*), Santa Barbara California. She is the author of**Elephants on the Edge:

What Animals Teach Us about

Humanity*<http://www.amazon.com/Elephants-Edge-Animals-Teach-Humanity/dp/0300127\

316%3FSubscriptionId%3DAKIAIRKJRCRZW3TANMSA%26tag%3Dpsychologytod-20%26linkCode%\

3Dxm2%26camp%3D2025%26creative%3D165953%26creativeASIN%3D0300127316>

*, an in-depth psychological portrait of elephants in captivity and in the

wild. Her work focuses on human-animal relationships and trauma recovery of

species that include elephants, grizzly bears, tortoises, chimpanzees, and

parrots.*

 

 

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