Have you seen this?
http://www.earthlings.com/earthlings/video-full.php
Its beautiful, and painful at the same time....and worth the watch.
Hope this finds you well my friend.
Nikki
The first post
Posted By Harry on June 19, 2010
It’s a lengthy experience setting up a blog. The software. The layout. The pictures. The content. And then the first post. You set up a blog because you have something to say (probably a whole lot to say) but what do you say in your first post? You mull it over and repeat a hundred times, ‘It must be perfect.’ You put off writing it and again play with different themes. Then go back to the original. You add more pictures. Change their size. You put off writing the first blog.
And then something happens. You find the body of one of your mates. He’s been missing for 48 hours so it’s not a surprise. But it is a shock. Lying there, lifeless. Alone. And you didn’t get to say goodbye.
Arthur
It’s Arthur. 4 meals missed and he’s never missed one before. I dig a hole next to his old mate; I’ll bury them together. Plato and Chelsea – Avondale’s 2 border collies – are by my side. Chelsea at a distance finds something to chew – an old duck feather. Plato stays with Arthur and I, sniffing him, peering into his grave. 14 years old, 3 unrelated cancers in 6 weeks, and currently undergoing chemotherapy for one of them, Plato knows one day I’ll be deciding where to bury him. I tell him ‘Yes. But not yet.’ Hopefully never but I know, bar some freak accident, he’ll go before I do. And I’ll bury him.
I leave the other 60 ducks on the dam and walk back to the shed. Life is all around me – dogs, horses, goats, donkeys, pigs, chickens, peacocks. But one life won’t come for his special meal around the side of the shed tonight. He won’t wait patiently for me to feed the family before meeting me outside the shed door. He won’t come to see me for our morning chats. He won’t be in his house at midnight when I get home late and say goodnight to the family, having our chat under moonlight, torchlight, or a combination of both. I hear Sting’s haunting Lest we forget how fragile we are. Arthur’s life – that fragile thing we all have for an unknown, limited time – is gone.
Time to write this first post. Wait much longer and I may never get to write it. I think of Robert Fulghum’s words:
Goldfish and hamsters and white mice and even the little seed in the Styrofoam cup – they all die. So do we.
And I think of Arthur and how his years at Avondale have touched me. How for some inexplicable reason he attached to me and I to him. How I felt Marti’s death (the first non-battery hen to die at Avondale) and that of the un-named brushtail possum when Sue and I buried them this week, but how I didn’t feel those deaths as sharp as this.
And I wonder how many will want to say ‘Get over it Harry. He was just a duck.’ Just a duck? If Charlotte were still alive she’d weave a web with the words Some duck.
I lay Arthur on a bed of fresh hay and Plato, just a dog, and I bury just a duck.
Well I for one have shed a tear now for Arthur just a duck. I will probably shed another tonight when I release my pademelon even though she has been with me just ten days since I picked her up…Lifes really all about letting go isn’t it.
Yes, the more close lives that pass by or pass on the more one realises life involves repeatedly letting go. Some lives are easier to let go of than others though, and the reasons therefor aren’t always apparent. There are still another 60 ducks on the dam yet without Arthur it seems empty.