Mini chat room on sad or mad days

[Drakefell01]

Share things that make you sad, upset, or angry could be anything.

[Karna5]

I spent so much of my life sad or angry. I used anger to defeat sadness, and sadness came from anger.

The struggle, the way to find beauty, is to defeat sadness without anger and anger without sadness.

[Drakefell01]

Some people in life will be kind to others and other people will randomly turn to anger on others but that's the way of life just go on. this is something I learned in my childhood constantly being picked on for my size.

[Karna5]

Skunks are largely hated by humans. They are hated for what they are, for their natural existence.

Skunks die in the road, hit by uncaring drivers in their lethal cars, and the drivers only lament the smell, not the death.

In my former home, I used to keep food on the porch for the cats, raccoons, opposums, foxes, hedgehogs and various animals that used to visit.

I came home once, before I became legally blind and lost my job and could no longer drive, and there was a skunk on my porch. He was injured, Wounded. An animal, possibly a dog, had ravaged it. We looked at each other, staring quietly.

I sat in the grass and for nearly half an hour we silently gazed into each others existence, connecting.

Finally the skunk staggered off he porch, falling in his broken pain, off to die alone.

I wanted to hold the skunk, to pet it, to tell it all would be okay.

But I could not. The skunk was alone because of his nature. Cursed by life.

But he is part of me now. He is long dead, but he changed me.

[Drakefell01]

Sad story I can understand to I love crows and my neighbors throw things at them and yell at them, I love crows because of there nice dark colours and their intelligence but most people fail to recognize them as smart or important. 

[Karna5]

Three times in my life I killed insects for no reason, and the regret haunts me decades later.

When I was five, my father gave me a magnifying glass and taught me to use the sun to set things on fire. You can imagine what I did. I did not realize the shame of it yet, but that does not cure the pain.

When I was seven I saw a lightning bug flashing its brilliant beauty in the twilight, and I was holding a tennis racket. I swung at the insect, and it fell to the ground in pieces. An older boy saw this and yelled at me. And for the first time I considered that the insect was a person.

When I was twenty-five and should have known better, I was holding a shotgun, and I saw an insect on a tree stump, and unthinking I shot it. That was the third and last time I ever murdered anything without cause.

All three are regrets I will never shed. Regrets are poison because they cannot be cured, but they can make us better, sometimes.

If someone can throw stones at a crow for no reason, they can harm anyone for no reason. If those who stone crows are your friends, there is sadness in that. They are friends who break your heart, the worst type of friends we can have. And yet, often we cannot pick our friends. We must live with them, they and the whole world broken.

[Drakefell01]

I take spiders outside.

[Drakefell01]

I find it sad to kill anything. another thing I find is that people refuse to call fish animals and vegans eat fish what kind of cruel joke is that fish have rights!

[zixi]

George - a vegan won't eat fish. A vegetarian won't eat fish. There are people who describe themselves as vegan or vegetarian and then put provisos on it but it does not make them vegetarian or vegan in the sense that those who are truly vegetarian or vegan mean it. 

I agree that ecology has a bad time these days. We live surrounded by farm land which is constantly sprayed with one thing or another. We grow vegetables ourselves but we won't use any chemicals on them. So, instead we have an ambivalent relationship with wild life in that we encourage them here and then I weep because the rabbits have dug up and destroyed (but not eaten) the flowers I've grown for the bees. Ditto slugs but at least they eat the stuff. It isn't easy this way but at least we aren't poisoning the earth for whatever comes next...

@Karna5 - Hello! 

[Karna5]

5 hours ago, zixi said:

We live surrounded by farm land which is constantly sprayed with one thing or another. We grow vegetables ourselves but we won't use any chemicals on them. So, instead we have an ambivalent relationship with wild life in that we encourage them here and then I weep because the rabbits have dug up and destroyed (but not eaten) the flowers I've grown for the bees. Ditto slugs but at least they eat the stuff. It isn't easy this way but at least we aren't poisoning the earth for whatever comes next...

*Nods* My girlfriend's ethos is to not eat anything with eyes. That's the distinction to sentience she uses. We've been living together since around 2007, and I've helped her maintain an organic garden in my properties (I finance the requirements, and she does the gardening. I've been legally blind since 2013, so I couldn't help her if I wanted directly). What this means is we grow hundreds of assorted fruit bearing trees and plants, and we do not ever use any pesticides nor herbicides ever. Not any. Instead, we purchase as needed beneficial insects, spiders and soils. My previous house was in a suburb so required a lot of insect/spider purchases, but it worked wonderfully for more than a decade. When I moved to a rural property (13 1/2 acres in the middle of nowhere) I stopped having to buy the insects, but we still don't use pesticides nor herbicides. We just buy the trees by the hundreds. I also have a large pond on my property, and when I got the property it hadn't been maintained for at least fifteen years and could not sustain fish. So she spent the larger part of a year cleaning it (without herbicides), and we got plants that naturally cleaned it, and then we bought tilapia and the like to be its new inhabitants (it already has turtles and the like). We do not hunt animals, though all my neighbors do. We keep my property as a sanctuary just like in the previous property.

By mainstream definitions my girlfriend is not a vegetarian because she's not opposed to eating meat. She's opposed to eating life which has eyes, so there are primitive animals (clams, etc.) which a few times over the years she's eaten.

Back to the topic of sad or mad, the reason I moved from the suburban house to the middle of nowhere is back around 2013 she and I used to go for walks together late at night. One Saturday night at around 1:30 AM she told me she wanted to go for a walk, but I was not ready. So she went out by herself. A while later I wondered where she was, so I put my shoes on and went in the direction I thought she'd have gone. I heard some screaming and yelling, and as I got closer I heard a crowd of drunk people picking on someone. I wasn't worried for myself (I was armed with both a telephone and something lethal as needed), but I knew somebody was in trouble. Someone was in the early stages of getting attacked by ten or twenty loud drunkards. As you can guess, the victim was my girlfriend, and they were spewing terrible things about her. I told the crowd I had a telephone and was calling the police, and they tried to talk me down from that not realizing I knew their victim, but they backed off. They had slapped her, hit her a couple of times and verbally abused her terribly. (She also had a weapon she could have used against the crowd legally but elected not to use it.)

When the police arrived, instead of doing anything about the attackers, they asked my girlfriend what she was doing walking around late at night, as if it was her fault she had been attacked. They never did anything about or to the attackers. I helped her file police reports, and we eventually got a detective to investigate as he agreed the original police officers should have taken her side, but after several days of investigation the detective said there were too many suspects, and he could not figure out who the attackers were. Over the next couple of years people vandalized my property, so I got lots of security cameras, and then even catching people vandalizing my property on night sight film, the police couldn't figure out who the people were (too many suspects).

My girlfriend didn't feel safe there, and in 2015 I lost my job to blindness. But I had saved up enough money to outright buy a house without a loan (I had no debt at all, and we lived smartly saving much more than we spent for several years). I no longer had a job tying me to that location, and I would never have a job as I can't be a programmer anywhere without ability to read letters. So we started checking out secluded houses, and a few years later we found one I could afford, and we moved out of the city.

I still miss the raccoons and other wildlife my little sanctuary at the other house had. I'd sit peacefully on the porch in the darkness, and a family of raccoons would come visit and eat the food I kept out, and the baby raccoons would reach into my pockets or paw at my bare feet in the summer (winters hit -6 or colder Fahrenheit, so I spent less time outside barefoot winters, of course). I don't know what happened to the raccoons and opossums and feral cats and the like after I left, but the guy who bought my house was also an organic farmer who wanted to maintain the garden my girlfriend had built up over a decade, so the animals are probably still safe in that sanctuary.

Life is often brutal and hard. Justice doesn't exist. Heck, I've known that for ages a couple of decades ago I was arrested without even doing anything illegal or wrong, and the police lied to the judge, and I had to borrow money to get a lawyer to defend me against something that wasn't even a crime else I'd go to jail for five years. Until then I thought police were honest, but that cured my of that delusion. I realized then the U.S. prisons are full of people who are only there because they could not get the money to defend themselves from their accusers.

It's often brutal and hard, yes, but the whole point of life is to find joy in spite of brutality and harshness. Life never gets easier. It always gets harder, but that is the universe. We survive and make the effort to love what we have, what we encounter, and who and what we meet, when possible. This effort never ends, every day, every hour, every minute.