BITS & PIECES OF A MISPLACED LIFE

One of my all-time favorite books is What's in the Names of Wild
Animals by Peter Limburg, illustrated by Murray Tinkelman'
(Toronto: Longman Canada Limited,  1977). Here is the opening
paragraph:

     ANIMAL is a word imported directly from ancient Rome,
     where it meant "a living being." The word comes from
     anima, Latin for "soul" or "breath of life." Despite its 
     illustrious Roman ancestry, animal is practically a new-
     comer to the English language. It was hardly used at all
     before the 1600s, and even then only by scholars....

**

ANIMALS
 
Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims
 he intends to eat until he eats them.
 
SAMUEL BUTLER
 
 
 
           If a turtle doesn't have a shell, is he homeless or naked?
 
GEORGE CARLIN
 
 
           Why don't sheep shrink when it rains?
 
       GEORGE CARLIN
 
 
As humans, we are well acquainted with the needs and capacities of the human body –we live our own bodies and so know, from within, the possibilities of our form. We cannot know, with the same familiarity and intimacy the lived experience of a grass snake or a snapping turtle; we cannot readily experience the precise sensations of a hummingbird sipping nectar from a flower or a rubber tree soaking up sunlight. And yet we do know how it feels to sip from a
fresh pool of water or to bask and stretch in the sun.
 
David Abram. The Spell of the Sensuous (New York:
Vantage Books, 2017)

I meant what I said, and I said what I meant...
An elephant faithful -- one hundred per cent !
 
  Theodor Seuss Geisel, Horton Hatches the Egg, 1940
epigraph to Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen (Chapel Hill
Algonquin Books, 2006)
 
**
    SPIDERS
    are named
   by what they do,
   spinning their webs,
   as all of us
   are named
   by what we do.
   The lace of heaven
   is their province.
   In the highest wood
   all the spiders 
   gather
   to knit the snow.

  Louis Phillips
(from The Spider Anthology, edited by David Cornell
 (Arachne's Muse Foundation,Inc.1988)


                                        CATS
 
 
  It was Edward Lear, I believe, who said that the true test of imagination is the ability to name a cat.
  
   W.H. Auden
 
**



 I don’t know why cats are such habitual vomiters. They don’t seem to  enjoy it, judging by the sounds
 they make while doing it. It’s their nature. A dog is going to bark. A cat is going to vomit.
 
     Roy Blount, Jr.
 
 
   Cats are intended to teach us that not everything in nature has a purpose.
 
       Garrison Keillor
 
  Cats are rather delicate creatures and they are subject to a good many ailments, but I never heard of one who suffered from insomnia.
 
                                  Joseph Wood Krutch

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MOUCHE
 
Named for Scaramouche,
Comic actor with a sword,
My rum-lined cat purred
Her feline duels. The couch
 
Was hers, pillow, rug, & floor,
Her veritable kingdom
Of knotted fur loomed
Amid her arch & scratch, her-
 
Self alert, & en garde.
I confess defeat,
Subdued by energies, her flat
Poise before a leap, her hard
 
Indifference to command.
Yawning thrust & parry
She was my noble adversary.
Those who own a cat will understand.
-
Louis Phillips

**

SNAILS AND THE WEATHER

In Scotland snails were once used  to predict
the weather. Children sang the following rhyme:

  Snailie, snailie, shoot out your horn
  And tell us it will be a bonny day the morn.

          ********

 
**
ELEPHANTS
 
 
   I love to look on these overgrown beasts, with their 
vast bodies, their immense strength, their ungainly proportions, 
their docile harmlessness. Their very size and clumsiness 
make me a kind tenderness for them -- their unwieldy bulk 
has something infantile about it. Moreover they have large 
hearts. When they get wild, they are furious, but when they 
calm down they are peace itself.
 
                     Sir Rabindranath Tagore