The Animals Strike Back!!

And lastly kind readers, let me end on this final note for the day:

Every time I hear about a shark attack, or a chained, caged animal who let the captor have it, or even an escapee, I do a happy dance, I really do.

One small step for beings, one giant step for beings with teeth and claws!!!

Check this out!!! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15ut0KUHO9E
if it doesn't work goto Youtube and search for " When Animals Strike Deer Attack"

and this: www.youtube.com/watch?v=TriOIvvl2yI -

Dominion, or who the fuck do we think we are?

(before we begin, if you click on the title of this post you'll be taken to my website,
http://protestanimaltesting.wetpaint.com/)

So, today's "topic", if you will, is all about the funny, and yet, all too encompassing word, dominion. What exactly does it entail? What does it mean to give someone dominion over something?

Rule? Reign? Supremacy? Do these words sum up the concept of " having dominion over" well enough for you?

As a traveller, and more specifically, a backpacker, I try to walk lightly on the earth. I carry only what I can carry on my back, and in many situations, if I can't fit it in to my backpack, I leave it behind and am better off for it.

When I'm up north in the forest, I know that I am in someone else's home.
I understand that I am a visitor, and let's be frank here, I am, like all the other humans an uninvited intruder on the forest's solitude. Though, unlike the gun-toting muderers who roam our beautiful hinterlands, desecrating both the beings who indwell and the earth with their trash and hate, I walk quietly, I bring nothing save for a backpack and walking stick.

I am a meat-eater, but I also understand that this doesn't give me any special rights or privileges pertaining to having a sense of dominion over any other being, especially a being I am eating.

I, as a human, do not at all believe that humans are by any means "more evolved" or ]"more enlightened" than other beings. If anything, we are less so. We have rape. We have guns.

All beings have myriad of emotions and ways of interacting; many animal clans practice acts that I find disturbing, like gerbils who will eat their baby, when they "need protein", whatever, but we're not really much better are we?

Canada continues to murder our seals, Japan, Iceland and Norway still murder their whales, Americans are killing their wolves, and what's worse, their trying to do it "secretly" with the help of that wicked woman, Palin. We all know what China does to it's dwindling brown bear population; for anyone who doesn't, they kill them for their "parts" , yes that's right, murder for what ails you, literally, and then there are the Pandas, who have all but lost their natural home.
What about the Russians? The way they, like the Chinese, force and torture bears into "circus acts" and cages, is beyond disgusting. It humiliates me and hurts me, as if I asm a bear too. Though, I can not even begin to conceive what those bears, or any animal who is tortured and shamed must feel.

I have absolutely zero respect for these so called "cultures" of people.

http://members.tripod.com/~animom/circus.html

Check out this link! It's sad, and horrific, but think about our topic when reading it, will you?

northern adventures

For those of you from Canada, more specifically Ontario, I would like to do an homage of the wild north. I love my province, especially northern Ontario, because it's beautiful, and remote, and filled with life; not the human kind, necessarily, but the other kind, birds, and beavers, and bears, though unbelievably the fucking government allows "sport" hunting, well, let's call it what it is, shall we, murder, of mother bears, any bears. It's horrific.

I was lucky enough to see one, at a dump, sadly, but, all the same it was an amazing experience to behold! S/he was a shy, black bear, nibbling trash, and when our car pulled up, she quickly ducked behind the hill and back into the forest s/he went.

This is the photo we got, below.

Notice, too, what we do to the earth, and how disgusting we are with our throw away culture. All the bags of plastic, the couches was beyond grotesque to see; sad and depressing, more like.





Just one little gem. Ah, I love this park,

travelling...backwards

Then there's also travelling via memories, so that's kind of like travelling backwards in time.
( my cat is purring so loud right now, I have never heard a purr as loud! I guess she's that happy, which is good, cuz she's really loved:)

I found Homestar Runner after not having seen it for years, and searched and found one skit in specific that I found hilarious, but more than that, finding HR again reminds me of a pretty good part of my past, and a friend, who, at the time was good too.

http://www.homestarrunner.com/cantsayjob.html

Check it out!

Stay tuned for northern adventures....

Travelling with the heart

Yesterday,while fiddling with the radio in the car, as the passenger, I chanced upon the powerful and beautiful song "Change Gonna Come" by Sam Cooke.

I have tried and tried to add the song, or at least a link to a site to hear it, but I have been successfully unsuccessful each time..but go to http://www.imeem.com/ and you can find the song there.

Perhaps it was some sort of omen, but after not having heard that song for ages I heard it again in the same day, at the end of Malcolm X,( a film I have yet to watch in it's entirety, not for lack of wanting, I never seem know when it's on) and it was played when he was killed, in real life.

When I hear that song, I burst out into a gigantic smile, my heart smiles, even though the song is painful. He was a genius. He was able to take issues of jim crow racism and transform that horror and pain into healing art.

So, that, dear readers, is the other kind of travelling I'm talking about.

We can travel with our hearts, imaginations, emotions, words. For me, music is a very powerful agent in allowing this type of travel to happen; soul travel.

Why I adore travelleing!

So, dear readers, with a lovely mid-winter snow effect, is this the right word,(?) upon us, after that bizarre faux spring weather, post-Groundhog, we welcome President Obama today to Ottawa. Good on him, I say, for coming! Now on to the nitty gritty: why do we travel? I usually know why I travel, the reasons, or the lack of them. ( see my All about Colombia story. ) Travel is amazing. For me it's THE thing that truly gives me whirly-dizzy butterflies in my stomach, and that's just in the beginning stages of planning for a trip.

I love the thrill of going, and not really knowing what it is I'll be in for, so more times than not, I travel map-free.

I've seen a bear up north, which was both incredible, and sad, because s/he was in a dump, and Moose in Algonquin. The Northern lights in Grundafjordor, Iceland, a Mafia funeral in Naples, and I even took a photo! And if you think Naples is a third world city, wait till you see Colombia. I've been whale watching off the coast of Maine, and eaten raw shark, an Icelandic "delicacy", ok, I spit it out, because to all intents and purposes it smelled and tasted like rotting eggs, dogs droppings and hmm, what else? Anything vile I couldn't even imagine.
I've seen the unglamorous side of bull fighting in the south of France. I've climbed mountains in Scotland, Iceland, Italy and America. I've seen a tarantula walk past me, quite casually, in the outdoor lobby of a hotel in Cuba, and toucans roosting on a tree branch in the jungle of Costa Rica.
I've seen the greenest, flattest land that I didn't think really existed save for in the creations of those old Dutch painters, in Holland. I've slept in a hostel that was formerly a morgue in Glasgow; I found this out well after I left it, and had one of the best sleeps ever! Yes, I did sleep like the dead :). I've seen the Mississippi in St. Louis and I've been to East Cleavland; I watched as a dock filled with men, some young, some children with their fathers or brothers, but most were very old sat and fished for their dinner as the sun sank quickly. Poverty is a difficult equalizer.

I've eaten the best pizza in the world, in the birth place of pizza: Naples, made in the traditional way from Buffalo milk mozzarella, and all the while, packs of starving dogs would follow me, begging, I of course fed them, but my heart hurts, and still does.
I've seen a dead deer splayed across a northern Ontario highway, and I've also seen a family of white tailed deer with babies in tow, and a great blue heron hiding in the reeds of a swamp , and turtles both crossing the road, and sunning on water lilies.

In other words, I could say I've seen some truly spectacular things, which is true, but, more to the point, I observe things with my whole entire self. As I writer, I pay attention to the wonders and details of everyday experiences, especially when I am out of my everyday life and somewhere new.

travelling with all our senses can be both wondrous and painfully difficult, but all the same, it's life, unedited.

Scotland, part 2

That's the beautiful light of Scotland!

So, the mail did come, I was wrong. It happens, so does shit :)

And now, back to Scotland...the Scottish seem to really be a pretty friendly people, not at all like the leftovers we seem to get in "the colonies" and by that I mean, the racists, the skinheads all that garbage that is so often associated with people of Scottish origin, especially so, here in Canada, a land founded by the Scots.

Guess where?