A life for a life in Musings

The world is cruel and unforgiving. Well, actually scratch that, the world is not kind or cruel; the world is intrinsically selfish, fighting for its own self-preservation.

These are the facets of life that I was taught as a child… we have to kill the chicken, we have to kill the cow, we have to kill the pig—-because if we don’t then our family dies…

I remember as a kid watching wild animal shows with my mom… this particular one that I am reminded that sticks out in my head is the way that lionesses hunt compared to the way that hyenas hunt… when a lion is able to catch its prey, she digs her teeth into the throat of its prey and waits for it to bleed out and die, she doesn’t just eat it as it’s crying for help… when hyenas hunt they hunt in packs and they are ruthless and whether the animal is dead or not, they rip into its flesh and eat it as its dying…

I hated watching those shows and I would cry because I thought that both the lion and the hyenas were awful… but my mother told me “it’s either they eat or they die, it seems cruel to you but this is the cycle of life. The lioness is the most humble and pious creature that kills its food from the throat and she doesn’t eat it until it’s dead, she waits for it to die. The hyenas, the vultures the condors these bottom feeding creatures, they do kill in a less kind way, but who is it kind for? Whether the zebra is eaten alive or it bleeds out to death, why does it matter? And why would you cry or be upset my little one, if you do the same thing? At least the wild animals know where there food comes from, they have hunted and gathered themselves to have ONE meal for the month, you eat a meal every single day… so who’s really the wild animal?”

As upsetting as that was to me as a kid, I carried that in my soul for years… I carried that in my spirit watching my grandmother kill a chicken in front of me, my favorite chicken… I watched her slice a pigs throat in front of me… and it scarred me for life—but not in a negative way…

Those creatures lived a happy life… they were loved and they were nurtured and they were taken care of and they had names and they had access to the best life they could have… I don’t know what meats I ingest now… I don’t know them… were they fed well? Did they roam free? Did they live outside of cages? Did someone love them? Or even better were they just hunted and they happened to be the one to nourish family?

I bring this up and it’s always something in the forefront of my mind because as I watch my mother die slowly in front of me and think it’s awful and inhumane as Alzheimer’s eats her away… who is it inhumane for? This is the circle of life… to bring in a new life an old life needs to be sacrificed… it’s only painful to me, because I still haven’t embraced fully everything that I was taught.

A life for a life… you can’t continue to exist if life isn’t sacrificed to create new generations. It’s stupid to feel bad that someone who has lived and experienced life is dying…
Life isn’t kind or cruel… it balances everything as it should for its own self-preservation.

My grandmother told me that it’s the gravest sin to pull the bread out from your own mouth and starve to feed a starving person…it’s an immortal sin, and you will never reach heaven or hell because of it, your soul will exist in a miserable limbo.

However, Alzheimer’s is one of the cruelest ways that nature creates balance… we have to watch that person fall into a perpetual state of abyss. I can’t reach her, I can’t save her, I can’t help her… I can only stand by her and keep her physical body safe, as her mind disintegrates in a yo-yo of limbo and misery. That hurts. Then again, this is just like those lions and hyenas… what makes it awful? Is it my own human condition, reflecting on a natural process of life? is it that I don’t think it should happen this way, because I don’t like to see it?

It’s fucking ugly. But that’s my own perception, that has been given to me by years and generations of acculturation… the only thing in this world that unites every single being and organism in this universe, is that we are born… and that we die. That’s a guarantee, what you do between those two stages, is your business.