I've been reading a book called: "Attacked", which is a book of short stories about people who have been attacked by wild animals and survived. The book is edited by John Long. In one story called:
"I hoped it would finish me quickly", by Hugh Edwards, an event is described in which a lady named Val Plumwood is attacked by a crocodile, while cannoeing in an Australian river and she survives.
At the end of the story, Edwards writes:
"Hollywood films have tried to capture the terror of what Val Plumwood experienced, but they never have and never will. Surely, if we could harness the courage she showed, clawing up that muddy bank, tending her own wounds, forging on and refusing to give up, we might change the world. No less miraculous than her survival was her resiliency. Many such victims have survived only as gutted wrecks, never willing or able to integrate the shock and resume anything but shadow lives. The glory here is that Plumwood pushed through the horror and outrage of the attack and rejoined the living, and did so without wanting to convert every Australian crocodile into a pair of loafers. Believe this: many bitter survivors of animal attacks dedicate the rest of their lives to evening the score with the shark or the crocodile or the big cat."
If I change this sentence.....to read.....
and did so without wanting to get even with the N (and substitute the letter N for all the animals in the next sentence)
....just for the heck of it.....it really makes me think.
Especially this sentence:
Many such victims have survived only as gutted wrecks, never willing or able to integrate the shock and resume anything but shadow lives.
Sometimes I feel like a gutted wreck,... empty... and I'm just following life along like a shadow. Sometimes I am not integrating the shock/and other feelings very well at all.
The glory here is that Plumwood pushed through the horror and outrage of the attack ...
This is what I think I must do. I have never thought about it in those terms....pushing through the horror and outrage.....like thread through a needle. The pain is big and the space it must pass through is very small.
Some days I feel very strong, as if I am doing that....integrating it all....becoming whole....feeling resilient and rejoining the living. My needle is then threaded.
My hope is that there will be more and more days of rejoining and less and less of the days when I feel wrecked.
I wish this for (((all))) here too.
Sela
