Long distance runner

Naivety,

Recognised as tolerance and likeness,

Only to be spewed out and challenged as second best.

Keep on running,

Running away from the empty shell,

The expectations that make it all seem like Hell.

Where to from here?

Grab the metaphorical wheel and steer

Off into the distance.

Where to?

Nobody yet knows,

Yet follow the course where the river flows.

Loneliness of a loner

Angst of an anarchist

Heart of a recluse,

Too much to shape into a mould,

Too much to do as told.

But you run for the distance,

There’s something better than this,

Something much grander

so as not to miss.

So, keep on running,

Don’t slow down,

The place you’ve been searching for,

Is soon to be found.

~Charlie xx 

Conversations with my Mother

Scenario:

The trees are billowing in the breeze and the smell of coffee permeates through the air. My mother and I sit on the porch on a sunny Saturday morning having breakfast.

Tilly, our cat, makes an entrance and leaps onto the balcony to have a better viewing of some birds nearby.

My mother exclaims that Tilly is a majestic cat (truthfully) and that he loves birds, so much so that he brings them back to her alive as presents.

Confused, I ask why Tilly would go against his very nature of being a cat, which is to capture and kill prey. My mother replies that he is just a sweet cat.

I, of course found this amusing for several reasons- the first being that my mother had assumed that Tilly had a sense of morality (similar to her own) and that it was enough to override his feline instincts.

The second reason was that I’ve only ever seen poor, dead birds dangling from Tilly’s piercing grip so I reckon that my mother may have imagined that they were alive (maybe in a euphemistic way).

With respect to my first point, it was intriguing to me how much my mother projected her sense of morality to Tilly, whom she felt such a deep connection with. On an objective level, it is clear that cats are hunters and evidently kill their prey; cat homes are notorious for being graveyards of victims of felines. Yet, my mother projected these feelings of mercy onto Tilly as though he acted on her plane of free will and choice. Living beings all have different views of this thing called morality- which is very subjective to said being.

Tilly may very well have some feline principles which he abides to, but it isn’t quite the same as to what my mother may view as wrong or right. Cats give in to their primordial instincts, yet paradoxically, it's these same animals who show levels of compassion when us, humans fall short. Tilly never fails to know when someone in the house isn’t feeling that great and shows the utmost levels of love and companionship; traits that are as human in nature.

Musings on our cat (who isn’t just a cat) may seem a bit mundane, but it points out some very beautiful points about we know (or think we know) about morality and levels of empathy in singular beings. As an animal lover, it’s beautiful to see animals beyond their basic primordial instincts and display kindness, love and empathy.

Maybe we can all learn to be more human by learning from other living creatures.

Charlie xx