I called the “Jack of Trades” to come help me.
I had known that the mice were beginning to move into the garage due to the extended freeze we had experienced recently.
And now I had just seen one very fat adult mouse inside the house – perched on top of our dryer!
We needed to intervene immediately – but I was not ok with ‘Jack’s” initial outright assertion that we would kill the critters.
To me, this did not feel right.
I could understand that when working in agriculture, mice can be so devastating to crops (and thus human livelihoods) that survival can come to an “us or them” battle by applicable philosophy.
But that was not the case here.
We just needed to round the mice up and prevent their returned entry.
Yet, initially, I was confused by the panicked discovery of “invasion” having gone too far.
As we waited for landlord approval to install a basket-sealed dryer vent in order to effectively address the situation, I internally prevaricated, unsure of the best decision.
Then, upon returning home one evening, I found a young mouse’s dead body curved along the inside of the cat food bowl.
The sadness and regret I felt in finding life taken in this manner tugged at me.
The next morning, as I sat down briefly onto the toilet in groggy awakening, what must have been a sibling to the prior youth darted into the bathroom near my feet from under the door, looked up and saw me – then darted out again.
With that unnerving “what the?!” it was time to make a decision!
As I prepped to drive to the Home Depot to determine which traps to purchase, I was suddenly drawn into the most recent “great worm harvest” experience, where I rescued likely over 200 worms from incoming snow exposure and redistributed them to planted pots in my garden.
While gathering them one-by-one for about an hour and shivering from cold as the insides of my nose melted, I had eased into a state of meditation and soon found myself sometimes humming – as if crooning to the worms to gain their cooperation.
I was certainly quietly talking to them when tbey resisted!
A sense of peace and wonder filled my core about how the many forms of life on our planet exist for purposes, and that we are all dependsnt upon one another for our own species’ continued survival.
And it felt right that I wanted to help preserve life – in fact, I would want forces greater than humanity to also offer me/us the same consideration!
During this process, my compassion was able to work past the cognitive dissonance of societal programming’s assertion that my duty as a human was to defend my home violently.
For I remembered my family’s decision to be gentle with nature during those challenging three years on the mountain – and how, in return, nature and its wildlings had also found ways to live with us peacefully.
Candid Corvid Productions 