Elders
we have been here so short a time
and we pretend that we have invented memory
we have forgotten what it is like to be you
who do not remember us
we remember imagining that what survived us
would be like us
and would remember the world as it appears to us
but it will be your eyes that will fill with light
we kill you again and again
and we turn into you
eating the forests
eating the earth and the water
and dying of them
departing from ourselves
leaving you the morning
in its antiquity
_{w.s. merwin}

I think I could turn and live with animals,
they are so placid and self-contain'd
I stand and look at them long and long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania
of owning things,
Not one kneels to another, not to his kind that lived
thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.
_{walt whitman}

The fact that so many of us are increasingly isolated from the presence of animals may contribute to the growing despair we feel. Direct encounters with animals, meeting them eye to eye on their own ground, evokes a sudden wonder and respect. Their vivid life brings us alive to the source that creates and sustains all beings. Without such encounters we risk losing that part of ourselves which most deeply resonates with nature -- the heart of compassion.

If our greatest loss with the animals has been to lose touch with the reality of their existence, our second loss has been to banish them from our minds. We assume they have nothing to teach us about the predicaments of our existence. We no longer know how to listen to the wisdom of the various four-legged, six-legged, finned and winged creatures that share our life on this Earth. We forget they are ancestors as well as kindred. Long before we existed they worked out the round of life in thousands of variations, as though anticipating the experiments of human cultures.

We are asked to awaken to the plight of our animal relatives, to let their beauty and power come alive for us once more. We are members of a human family and society, but the presence of animal "others" enlarges our perception of the self beyond the city and opens us inward to that ground of being where live the lizard and monkey, the fish and the bear. These are Our Relations. These are, like us, offspring of the Great Mystery, and necessary parts of a balanced and living whole. _{elizabeth roberts & elias amidon - earth prayers}