Yesterday I visited the rabbit pen and other farm animals on the property where I am staying. One of the young men who tends the pen showed me a baby rabbit, or more like toddler rabbit, still alive, whose back legs had literally been eaten off by a rat that had gotten into the cage in the night. Quite a sight. One back leg was completely eaten off, so that there was not even the bone. The other leg was eaten off the bone, and the bare bone was sticking out.
I did not feel like leaving the rabbit with the others without doing something to try to alleviate its trauma, so took the bunny in a box and spent the better part of yesterday with it. Friends helped to crush some painkiller in water and feed it to the bunny along with some green juice with an eyedropper. We cleaned him up very gently by clipping off hanging masses of hair and bone that had been torn away and still hung by a thread of tissue. We made him a soft bed and doing that I wondered how many beings die afraid, in pain, and unattended. As we were doing this, I thought, this rabbit stands for all the agony everywhere. Especially Libya and Japan.
It's the year of the Iron Rabbit. Even though there are billions of living beings everywhere who experience one form of misery, trouble, injustice, or another, yesterday it was one rabbit that presented himself: but it felt in all its utter cosmic insignificance, a touch significant: the whisper of something carrying a shining gift.
The rabbit got to hear some Buddhist prayers in its sweet floppy ears. After a full day hanging in there with its massive injuries, though wide-eyed with steady quick breath, and at times very responsive, particularly to certain prayers and mantras, it slipped away last night. What an incredible gift this rabbit. We could any of us die very soon; what a privilege to be present in gentle cooperation and love, rather than in heavy baggage that misinforms us.
Rabbit died well cared for and with lustrous gazing eyes. And okay, though there's great suffering all around doesn't preclude pouring ourselves out for what's right here. This is it. And they all really have been our mothers. Hopefully we will meet again under happier circumstances. In fact, I have no doubt we will.
