Is it Pleasing to the Body?

Part 3 of April's theme: Money

Image and article © a.m. bhatt

1.

A rabbit moved slowly across the forest floor. He had light brown fur with patches of dark brown under his eyes.

As he moved past them, he sniffed at the fallen leaves and feathers.

And the moss.

And the ferns.

And the hills made by ants.

And droppings left by creatures larger and smaller than he.

At times, something would please his sniffer and he would take it into his mouth. If it brought further pleasure there, he chewed and swallowed it, making it a part of himself.

He moved this way for as long as his body asked to be pleased. And never a moment longer.

2.

One day, shortly after the start of Spring, the one with white spots on its tail, whose burrow was a distance away in the direction of the burrow that the sun wakes up from, told him there was to be a gathering of the rabbits of the forest.

At the gathering, the one with white spots on its tail said, “This Winter we have lost the one with a red eye, the one with black front feet, and the one with one torn ear.”

“I am afraid of the Winter,” he continued.

“I have always been afraid of the Winter.

I am tired of being afraid of the Winter.”

The rabbits all twitched their noses and flopped their ears. It was harder to find things that pleased the nose and the mouth and the body in Winter. There were fewer shrubs to hide in and, as a result, more ways to become pleasing to the nose and mouth and body of the fox and the hawk.

3.

The one with the white spots on its tail moved nervously across the forest floor. It hastily consumed whatever wasn’t too unpleasing to its sniffer and then, just as hastily, moved on.

Weren’t there very many more leaves on the ground today? And hadn’t the wind begun to blow stronger and colder recently?

The one with the white spots on its tail picked up his pace through the forest, and along the way consumed all that wasn’t too terribly displeasing.

The one with the patches of dark brown fur under his eyes was resting at the base of an ostrich fern - an act that was pleasing to his body on this Summer afternoon. He watched and wondered why the one with the white spots on its tail was putting so many things into his body that were displeasing. There was much scattered across the forest floor that was pleasing to the Body in Summer - why did the one with the white spots on its tail miss them?

The one with the patches of dark brown fur under his eyes decided he really didn’t need an answer to the question of why other rabbits did what they did. He sniffed the air and hopped off in the direction of his burrow. A nap on a Summer afternoon was very pleasing to the body.

4.

Winters are different from Summers. What there is to sniff and taste and bring into our bodies is different. Our bodies developed over countless millennia in these cycles of Winter and Spring and Summer and Fall, and are pleased differently in each stage of the cycle.

To attempt to please the body in Winter with the ways of Summer or in Spring with the ways of Fall is to be a rabbit no more. It is to be a stranger in the Garden, forever scared and lost.

Our minds developed much, much later. Or perhaps at the same time, but differently. You’d have to ask a not-rabbit for the details of it. But however and whenever they developed, our minds live eternally clinging to the Spring, to the time of new abundance.

And they live ever in terror of the Winter.

They seek to conquer and enslave the body and suppress it’s interdependence with the Garden and its cycles. And they seek to build, in the Garden’s place, a city of eternal Spring.

They offer tokens - and token collection schemes - as a means and a measure of abundance in the hope that we will forget that abundance is experienced not when the body is full, but when it is pleased. And they are blind to a central truth that every Garden-dweller lives in: an eternal Spring is as damaging to and corrupting of the body as an eternal Winter.

But perhaps they will succeed in their quest for an eternal Spring.

Or perhaps they will succeed only in destroying the very essence of rabbit-ness.

I will not live long enough to see either outcome.

But, with both dark brown patches under my eyes and white spots on my tail, I spend the time I do have working to remember that as appealing as eternal Spring may seem to my mind, I am of the Garden.

And I have no cause to fear the changing of seasons.