tigersihaveknown-deactivated201 asked: I have a calmness inside of me now knowing that people out there, kind amazing wonderful people, read that entry and even gave it the time of day. For it was highly personable and one of the closest things relating to my own life, actually, maybe the only one that is all real? I just want to thank you for just reading, for appreciating my feelings and not finding them immature or something to be set aside. Thank you. XXangela
I visited the zoo several months ago after a few decades since the last visit and it was an overwhelmingly depressing experience. It was a theme park of depression, in fact, and the artificiality of the lives in those enclosures just weighed me down for weeks. It was different from my experiences on farms where the animals seemed more animated, more willing to live, than the ones at the zoo. They rushed for food, galloped across fields, and made all kinds of sounds. The animals at the zoo just meandered along from one corner to another (although one especially angry gorilla hurled mud with great fury), and they didn’t seem very interested in anything. It had me thinking about the differences between those environments and that’s when I realized that those farm animals, the ones seemingly so full of vigor? They were used to that life, and they knew what to expect in their domesticated paradise. The food and the galloping, it was all they knew. But those zoo animals, they weren’t used to the life. They had known freedom, unhindered and savage, at the mercy of their own instinct and will to survive. The cages that held them were boundaries that were as foreign to them as the the wilds of the world would be foreign to the farm animals. Given a choice one can only conclude that the zoo animals, the ones whose instinct and blood memory still linked them to the wild places, would choose to return to those environments, and the farm animals, whose lives revolved around the familiarity and comfort of domestication, would remain there.
And all of this, these thoughts and ponderings, they faded away. They were filed in the archive and forgotten so that I could carry on, doing what I do for my daily bread, and living what I am satisfied to call an existence but not quite certain I would call a life. I’d all but forgotten that I could think of such things until I was reminded that we are all of us capable of every thought, but only through inspiration and the relation of human experience can we be certain that it is okay to do so.