We belong here, possum and person alike

~ Live & Learn

The Virginia opossum who has taken to sleeping beneath our family room may likewise have only one surviving baby, but the one we have seen seems to be having a grand time figuring things out. On our trail camera, we see it climbing onto our back deck from time to time. My husband, who likes to sit out in the dark backyard and look at the moon, once heard something stirring at his feet. When he opened the flashlight app on his phone, the young opossum was sniffing a box of crackers that my husband had set on the ground.

I’m not anthropomorphizing here. To understand that we all exist in a magnificent, fragile body, beautiful and vulnerable at once, is not to ascribe human feelings to nonhuman animals. It is only to recognize kinship. We belong here, possum and person alike, robin and wren and rabbit, lizard and mole and armadillo. We all belong here, and what we share as mortal beings is often more than we want to let ourselves understand. We all have overlapping scars.

I think the ever-present threat my wild neighbors live with must tell us something about the nature of joy. The fallen world — peopled by predators and disease and the relentlessness of time, shot through with every kind of suffering — is not the only world. We also dwell in Eden, and every morning the world is trying to renew itself again. Why should we not glory in it, too?

— Margaret Renkl, from “The Nature of Joy” (NY Times, June 26, 2023)

DK Photo of White-Tailed Deer, 5:30 am. June 25, 2023. More photos from morning walk here.

16 thoughts on “We belong here, possum and person alike”

  1. “We also dwell in Eden, and every morning the world is trying to renew itself again. Why should we not glory in it, too?” ❤️

    … enough said!
    Thank you, DK

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  3. Aah, Renkl again. I love her ways with words. I so agree with her. When HH, over breakfast, has the corners of his mouth hanging down, I encourage him to ‘pull them up’, I often remind him of How lucky and undeservedly blessed we are… I shall gladly add Renkl’s words to my morning mantra. Thank you Dave.

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  4. What echoes in my head – ‘we all belong here’ – and as welcome as this thought my be, the reality that we sabotage our world, destroy both flora and fauna at whim, somehow makes the words beautiful and poignant.

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  5. “we all exist in a magnificent, fragile body, beautiful and vulnerable at once”! Thank you for your awareness Margaret Renkl and David. And, love that baby possum!

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