If you would like to participate in the memorial service for Charles Hahn and haven’t yet registered, here’s the link: https://bit.ly/charleshahn . Once you register, you will receive a confirmation email with more details. Thank you. ~ Marsha
What becomes of us if we all cannot live together?
JThese times of pandemic remind us how connected we are.
Now that we’re relegated to wearing masks and keeping six feet apart it’s become clear we are our neighbors’ keepers. The face mask has become a symbol of each of us caring for one another. When Marsha and I walk in our neighborhood we take turns with our neighbors moving off the sidewalk as we pass each other, always with a smile or friendly gesture.
Jessica Griffin, staff photographer with the Philadelphia Herald, captured this picture of neighborliness.
J
Whether we like it or not, we are being forced by Mother Nature to act with collective responsibility. Perhaps this lesson is a prelude to the graver lessons Mother Nature is fixing to mete out on account of our indifference toward her environment.
What goes around comes around.
The question that now hangs over mankind, like the Sword of Damocles, is whether we’ll leave our bunkers and fight this fight as a global community or be prepared to go the way of the polar bear, the honey bee and the monarch butterfly.
Sometimes a lesson is easier understood if taught in the language of a children’s story.
THE MOUSE TRAP
There’s an old story from an unknown other about a mouse who looked through the crack in the wall to see the farmer and his wife open a package. “What food might this contain?” the mouse wondered. He was devastated to discover it was a mousetrap. Retreating to the farmyard, the mouse proclaimed the warning: “There is a mousetrap in the house! There is a mousetrap in the house!”
The chicken clucked and scratched, raised her head and said “Mr.Mouse, I can tell this is a grave concern to you, but it is of no consequence to me. I cannot be bothered by it.
The mouse turned to the pig and told him “There is a mousetrap in the house! There is a mousetrap in the house!” The pig sympathized, but said; “I am so very sorry, Mr. Mouse, but there is nothing I can do about it but pray. Be assured you are in my prayers.”
The mouse turned to the cow and said “There is a mousetrap in the house! There is a mousetrap in the house!” The cow said; “Wow, Mr. Mouse. I’m sorry for you, but it’s no skin off my nose.”
So, the mouse returned to the house, head down and dejected, to face the farmer’s mousetrap alone.
That very night a sound was heard throughout the house – like the sound of a mousetrap catching its prey. The farmer’s wife rushed to see what was caught. In the darkness, she did not see it was a venomous snake whose tail the trap had caught. The snake bit the farmer’s wife. The farmer rushed her to the hospital and she returned home with a fever.
Everyone knows you treat a fever with fresh chicken soup, so the farmer took his hatchet to the farmyard for the soup’s main ingredient.
But his wife’s sickness continued, so friends and neighbors came to sit with her around the clock. To feed them, the farmer butchered the pig.
The farmer’s wife did not get well; she died. So many people came for her funeral, the farmer had the cow slaughtered to provide enough meat for all of them.
The mouse looked upon it all from his crack in the wall with great sadness.
Suddenly, like that mouse, we are all equally threatened and faced with the same truth. There is no way through if we don’t act together.
Just a thought…
Pat
Copyright © 2020 Patrick J. Moriarty. All Rights Reserved.
Would you like to submit a post to Just A Thought? To learn more, please click here.