The children have for as long as I can remember had a very special love for frogs.
There has always been the awareness of their singing at dusk, their spring time mating in our ponds or blow-up pools and there has always been the catching of them followed by their release back into the wild. We usually always keep an observatory for all the little creatures that the children find, much love and attention goes into the keeping of the observy, as we lovingly call it, and it changes frequently between earthen, dessert and watery world.
When I arrived back from Denmark it was an earthen home and housed a baby tarantula and a lizard, the children would catch and bring bugs to the little creatures for as long as they kept them in captivity.
The frog in these pictures is called Camelia, and from what the children tell me she keeps coming back, they release her and she finds her way back to them within a few days. The observatory was changed into a watery world filled with rocks for Camelia and her friend another tree frog, who quickly escaped.
After a day in captivity Camelia was released back into the cenote.
The observatory before it was changed for Camelia.
Cleaning the cenote, as is currently happening, has the added benefit for the children that as a last step in the process a big pump is used to vacuum mud and sediments from the cenote floor onto the gardening area, and is there anything nicer on a hot day than to submerge
yourself into the slimyness of mud, and then to jump into the cool cenote water to rinse off?
Finally we had yet another burial, this time of a bunny.
Keenan's favorite bunny who he had called Black Beauty escaped from the bunny corral at the beginning of last week, he was extremely touched by the escape and feared for the bunny's life in the wild. His grief was intense for about half an hour then he let it go.
5 days later he found Black Beauty outside the fence of the bunny corral exhausted, he died in Keenan's arms a few minutes later, and Keenan went through the grief all over again,
heartfelt tears for the loss of the little bunny's life.
We buried him in the garden next to Vampira, a bat the children had found wounded while I was away, and had not succeeded in bringing back to health.
I love to observe the children and their honest emotions; their grief so intense, their compassion so real
and yet they naturally allow the feelings to pass through them, feel them fully and then release them.
~Blessings~
I don't do the pushing in the dirt part of burying a beloved animal very well.
ReplyDeleteIsn't funny - mud and children. maybe someday I'll try it myself and see if I can remember.
The shots are beautiful. But my favorite is the one above the water, when your beautiful daughter makes a perfect curve with her entire body - like a sylph.
Frogs and bunnies, your children and mine would have so much fun together. We're missing our tropical frogs here in our new/old home.
ReplyDeleteSafe journeys.
oh sweet keenan. a similar thing happened to ezra when his beloved horse eli died when we were staying with my in-laws at the end of my pregnancy. eli died the same day as my step-father - making the passing of both very real and palpable for ez. poppy died in the morning (which he didn't witness) and then eli thrashed about in the corral the same evening, which ezra did see entirely, and passed away hours later at the animal hospital where he couldn't be saved. ezra had an intense reaction too and then let it go as well. and i love how he talks about eli now with pure love and reverie. no sadness. just will mention him sporadically with fondness.
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