Catherine Greenfied-- Unbridled: Lessons from Nature.

I haven't had a lot of time this semester to do anything but work. I am taking a lot of classes... maybe too many classes. I keep heaping things on myself to do, and I never feel like I do any of them particularly well, because I have to spread my attention out every which way. I want to be out in the world, but I am not. It hurts me to not be out in the world. It makes me hurt inside.

I was walking back from a class one day this semester. I don't remember which one it was, and I suppose that's irrelevant information anyway... all I know is that, instead of noticing the weather and the birds and the leaves and the flowers and the little things crawling in the mulch as I usually do, I was feeling wave upon wave of pure, unbridled anger. I was probably just frustrated or disappointed, and that emotion had changed into anger as some form of mental or emotional defense mechanism, but, yet again and as usual, I digress.

I took my anger out on something pure and defenseless, and I still haven't gotten over it, completely. I saw something that looked happy and content and beautiful, and in my rage, railed at it.

I will confess. Here goes:

I kicked a pine cone.

"Well, that was anticlimactic," said the reader disdainfully, and went on to the next blog, looking for something of substance. Stay, reader! Allow me to explain! Or don't; your disinterest is no skin off of my back.

The pine cone was kicked, I say, by the rubber-clad sole of a person whose inner turmoil had caused her blind strife. I would have NEVER given myself over to something so distructive otherwise! Okay, that isn't true... if I had been in my room, maybe I would have thrown something there, too. Something mooshy, who would forgive me by way of my hugs and tears. The things in my room see me every day-- they know my disposition.

But this pine cone, poor, defenseless thing... it had fallen from its tree (or had been chucked from the back of a landscape van, or what have you), and was sitting, nice and fat and spiky, on the sidewalk. It was minding its own business. It was warming in the sun. It had no interest in my or my affairs. It looked to perfect, so peaceful, and I was infuriated by it.

So I kicked it.

As soon as my angry shoe struck the frozen fountain of wood, I felt a pang of regret. What had I done? How could I have let my anger hurt something else? I would NEVER have done something like that to a person! I would never have ripped up a flower in anger, nor crunched a beetle, nor thrown a rock at a pretty glass window! How could I have been so cruel!? I chased it into the road, elicting a shout from the occupant of a (slow moving, it wouldn't have hit me) car. I cradled it in my hands-- it pricked me! It hurt, and I bled a little. But I wouldn't let it go. I held it to me, ignoring the stickiness that coated my hands. I ignored the little pricks that cut my fingers. I took it to me to my next class, and the next, lementing over the broken spines, the dented rump.

What right? What awful right? None! I had seen how happy it was, and in my fury, in my jealousy, I sought to hurt something that was completely and utterly defenseless. I had rarely felt so poisoned by cruelty, by my own cruelty.

Dear reader, you say, "It has no beating heart! It has no blood, no veins! It has no nerves, no brain... it wasn't even rooted in the ground, if that's what you're so worried about! You didn't hurt it! What are you blabbering about?"

But how can you say so? Are YOU a pine cone? Are YOU an "inanimate, feelingless object"? How can YOU tell me, then, if it doesn't think and feel? Do you put so much faith in our human sciences and faceless FACTS to preach nervous systems and brains and bread and butter to ME? What right, I say, have YOU?

I took it home with me. I put it on my shelf, next to my friends The Stick and The Brown Pod of Oval Seeds. I had made friends with them before, but on different terms. It seemed happy there, next to my book of Goblins and my pile of laundry quarters. I packed it up in a box two days ago, and brought it home, buffered for the rollicking trip by a folded up dress shirt. I like it. It is my new friend. I do not mind it when it pricks me, because I have pricked it. We get along. We understand each other.

You may find me crazy now, reader. I understand, and I don't mind. I have known worse feelings than the rejection of a skeptic. Better to be a skeptic and be THINKING than a brainless idiot who follows sheep and doesn't think at all. I prefer to be rejected by a thinker than a sheep... although sheep can be nice. They wear nice wool coats.

My parting question to you, friend, before you take the path away from this raving, cone-befriending lunatic, is this: Does it MATTER whether or not the pine cone could feel me? It taught me a valuable lesson about treating all things with kindness, and bridling your own anger, about not taking it out on others. It checked my passion.

Have you ever kicked a stone in blind fury? Maybe you actually DO know what I mean. Think on it, reader. It's something to think about, at the very least. And thinking... that's good.