Substitutes

by Newnameelizabeth

It amazes me how resilient the earth and life are to catastrophes and disaster. Yet also how delicately some things have to be balanced. The latter things are rare and fleeting and the former things abundant. But there are also seemingly endless new rare things waiting for opportunities. They say earth has the largest number of types of minerals because of how they are formed through our unique plate tectonics and biological processes.

This does not negate the sadness of devastation or disaster. But because voids can be filled, either happily or not, sometimes we have to make a point to remember what was there previously. I don’t say first, because there may have been many iterations beforehand.

This was all spurred by my phone widget randomly selecting a photo from my library of an orphaned puppy our horse border bottle fed around the clock for about a month. She and her assistant became his substitute mothers and he appears to have thrived. I haven’t heard how he’s doing now.

I’m sure he has different behaviors than unseparated puppies do. We use the term well-adjusted to describe beings who cope well after coming from “unnatural” situations. Others remain stuck in the trauma. This puppy had a sibling who died early on.

Cynthia Ann Parker could or would not adjust back into the white world. Calling it white world opens a whole nother can of worms. Her son Quanah made it a point to adjust, though he had less of a natural relation to it. The whole native reaction and relationship, even currently, to colonization is utterly fascinating to me.

You could say Cynthia Ann was being stubbornly self-pitying, but some things are tragic enough to die of a broken heart over. The Indians who accepted capture to reservations and found some amount of happiness could be said to have accepted a substitute life. They grieved when their children found it to be primary.

Primary/natural verses secondary/synthetic is a very difficult question. In a sense, if you are interventionist at all, which even kick off-only clockmaker deists are, then everything has an element of synthetic to it. “Naturally occurring” can only be non-mindfully physics driven.

The only way mindfulness can be respected by naturalists is if you respect how a creator of nature wanted things to be, which the Indians did.

I mainly know how the Christian God wanted things to be, and that is with a female mother and a male father. Yet God also seems to think adoption and caring for other beings and things is good too. But don’t forget how it was, or was intended to be.