I knew as soon as I saw the feathers on the ground. The fluffy white down looked almost like clouds in the tall green grass. I glanced around, but didn’t see the small, lifeless robin until I turned the corner in the large glass stairway on my way to the basement. There it was, laying on its back picked to pieces. Part of me broke just a little at the sight of it, and I was filled with a sense of incompleteness and sadness – a voice that called from the inside silently screaming that this is not how things were meant to be.
But then, in the stillness, I thought of the hawk. I thought of the beauty of the hawks’s wings stretching across the sky, dancing across the horizon, and riding the current of the wind. In contrast to this exquisite image, the hawk’s basic survival relies on violence. All of the energy and the resources the hawk needs to propel through the air are provided by that meal.
I stopped and reveled in the gift of breathing in deeply, and my heart turned to humanity, and to the inevitability of violence. Death is part of the song of creation. The robin doesn’t stop contributing to the earth after death – the nutrients nourish the hawk and the soil – nothing is wasted, it’s just transferred and transformed.
I still have a hard time wrapping my mind around the fact that violence is, in fact, natural…but want to sound a reminder that just because something is natural, does not mean that it’s “good.” The hawk has no choice but to participate in the cycle of violence, but we were given the beautiful gift of choice – choice of how we will use our agency in the world. In what ways are we contributing to global violence? In what ways can the human violence we see around us be attributed to the survival impulse…and can we separate survival from power? Can we separate survival from fear? Can we separate survival from nationalism or ethnocentrism? How can we hold perpetrators accountable without denying the value of their humanity?
It’s just heavy. It’s heavy, and it should be heavy. How do we hold the tension between grieving and working towards the reduction of violence, while still validating humans’ basic instinct to survive? I’m going to go out on a limb here, and say it probably has little to do with increasing military defense spending. It probably has little to do with building walls. It probably has little to do with cultivating division both nationally and internationally.
It probably has more to do with generosity. It probably has more to do with making sure everyone has something to eat. It probably has more to do with making sure that everyone has access to clean water and health care. It probably has to do with building bridges and creating conversations and dialogue that build understanding across differences.
It’s inevitable – I know it is. My children will never know a world without violence. But I can’t stop thinking about this or simply look the other way. I can’t normalize it just because it has become “normal.” I don’t want my children to have everything – I want them to have enough…because I also want your children to have enough. I think that is a good place to start.
For good measure, here are some interesting thoughts on the lie of redemptive violence…
Photo by freestocks.org on Unsplash
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