Post by James on Feb 27, 2014 21:53:24 GMT 10
Samantha, this is a reply to the post you put in a celebration of nature together with other things I want to say about how nature has helped me. I’m putting it here on this new board where hopefully people will share their experiences of how nature is helping or has helped them with their healing. That is, should there be any other people out there doing their healing.
When Marion and I came together I was working at an aquarium and thought it would be nice to have some goldfish having come to love them since working in the shop, they being ‘only goldfish’ when I kept tropical fish as a young boy. I bought a tank and we delighted in watching Zac, a red lionhead, growing like Otto - A Fish Out Of Water, even when in his zeal to gobble up all the food pellets he inadvertently sucked the eye out of one of his friends. Zac was taken to an aquarium shop, hopefully to find a new home in a bigger tank, and I moved onto fulfilling an age old dream by replacing the goldies with African shell dwelling cichlids. These little shell dwellers happily bred and the aquarium shops - I was no longer working at the aquarium - happily took their progeny. Then I got a rare pair of ‘princess’ cichlids but they became ill, and try as I might I could not work out what was wrong with them. So disheartened - Marion coaching me back in those days to keep expressing all the bad feelings that I was still having difficulty admitting I was feeling - I decided to give up keeping fish, a knowing just came up within me: that it was the end.
We too had a pet bird, a pretty cockatiel, but we found as we also started to relate to her as ourselves being trapped and constrained - having our wings clipped being kept in the ‘care of our parents’, we could no longer keep her, so took her into the country to a man who was able to look after her in his big aviaries with hundreds of other cockatiels. We couldn’t just let her go, because in Melbourne, it not being their natural environment, they soon fall prey to the ravens, and starve. And so like you, it was ‘never again’ would we keep a bird in a cage.
Then we got an Oriental ‘blue’ kitten and she was with us for nine years, and oh boy did she help us with our healing!, so many bad feelings came up trying to ‘parent’ this little renegade. And as much as we loved her, when we put her down because of bad breeding and a jaw disorder, we completely knew: no, it wasn’t right for us to keep pets and we never would again.
For me it’s been a great part of my healing evolving through the need to have them, having grown up with the family dog, budgies - that the dog ate, my fish; keeping: cicadas, skinks, newts, frogs, crickets, caterpillars, terrapins, and accepting that’s just what you did - had pets. And having looked to pets for so much comfort and love, to then start to feel how bad it was for both them and myself to keep them, to control them, and to uncover the reasons why and the needs I had to do it: being able to assert power over them just as mum and dad asserted their power over me - there was just so much guilt I had to work through. And having expressed those bad feelings revealing the truth of them and then no longer feeling the need to have pets, oh what a relief it has been to feel let out of that terrible evilness: needing to make another creature be dependent on me - my own little possession with which I can do anything I like; and it has to just take it, unable to have any protest listened to or acted upon, and usually having to die because of my disregard for it; because: I got bored with it.
Now I only have to think of having a pet and I’m still the young child with no one listening to my protests, they making me do what they said and I just have to take it. And I wasn’t allowed to die, I had to keep going. And all I want to do is scream with the horror of it - NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! And keep screaming until the world crashes, until something happens... until someone listens, until someone who cares comes along and saves me... until I am set Free. Until I can set myself free through my feelings and the truth they show me.
It’s a horrible dynamic: We were treated as a pet, so we need to treat another creature or our own children as pets. We were made to feel so powerless, so we need to make another creature or our children feel powerless in the mistaken belief that we’ve gained some of that power we lost. ARGH! I WANT TO SSSCCCRRREEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAMMMMMMMMMM!
This is not my tank, none of the photo's I post are mine - we don't have a camera. It's a bubble eye, cousin of Zac. We kept them too, but had endless troubles with their swim bladders which helped us give them up as we didn't want to participate in supporting the fish breeding trade that bred such unnatural and unhealthy little fish.
When Marion and I came together I was working at an aquarium and thought it would be nice to have some goldfish having come to love them since working in the shop, they being ‘only goldfish’ when I kept tropical fish as a young boy. I bought a tank and we delighted in watching Zac, a red lionhead, growing like Otto - A Fish Out Of Water, even when in his zeal to gobble up all the food pellets he inadvertently sucked the eye out of one of his friends. Zac was taken to an aquarium shop, hopefully to find a new home in a bigger tank, and I moved onto fulfilling an age old dream by replacing the goldies with African shell dwelling cichlids. These little shell dwellers happily bred and the aquarium shops - I was no longer working at the aquarium - happily took their progeny. Then I got a rare pair of ‘princess’ cichlids but they became ill, and try as I might I could not work out what was wrong with them. So disheartened - Marion coaching me back in those days to keep expressing all the bad feelings that I was still having difficulty admitting I was feeling - I decided to give up keeping fish, a knowing just came up within me: that it was the end.
We too had a pet bird, a pretty cockatiel, but we found as we also started to relate to her as ourselves being trapped and constrained - having our wings clipped being kept in the ‘care of our parents’, we could no longer keep her, so took her into the country to a man who was able to look after her in his big aviaries with hundreds of other cockatiels. We couldn’t just let her go, because in Melbourne, it not being their natural environment, they soon fall prey to the ravens, and starve. And so like you, it was ‘never again’ would we keep a bird in a cage.
Then we got an Oriental ‘blue’ kitten and she was with us for nine years, and oh boy did she help us with our healing!, so many bad feelings came up trying to ‘parent’ this little renegade. And as much as we loved her, when we put her down because of bad breeding and a jaw disorder, we completely knew: no, it wasn’t right for us to keep pets and we never would again.
For me it’s been a great part of my healing evolving through the need to have them, having grown up with the family dog, budgies - that the dog ate, my fish; keeping: cicadas, skinks, newts, frogs, crickets, caterpillars, terrapins, and accepting that’s just what you did - had pets. And having looked to pets for so much comfort and love, to then start to feel how bad it was for both them and myself to keep them, to control them, and to uncover the reasons why and the needs I had to do it: being able to assert power over them just as mum and dad asserted their power over me - there was just so much guilt I had to work through. And having expressed those bad feelings revealing the truth of them and then no longer feeling the need to have pets, oh what a relief it has been to feel let out of that terrible evilness: needing to make another creature be dependent on me - my own little possession with which I can do anything I like; and it has to just take it, unable to have any protest listened to or acted upon, and usually having to die because of my disregard for it; because: I got bored with it.
Now I only have to think of having a pet and I’m still the young child with no one listening to my protests, they making me do what they said and I just have to take it. And I wasn’t allowed to die, I had to keep going. And all I want to do is scream with the horror of it - NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! And keep screaming until the world crashes, until something happens... until someone listens, until someone who cares comes along and saves me... until I am set Free. Until I can set myself free through my feelings and the truth they show me.
It’s a horrible dynamic: We were treated as a pet, so we need to treat another creature or our own children as pets. We were made to feel so powerless, so we need to make another creature or our children feel powerless in the mistaken belief that we’ve gained some of that power we lost. ARGH! I WANT TO SSSCCCRRREEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAMMMMMMMMMM!
This is not my tank, none of the photo's I post are mine - we don't have a camera. It's a bubble eye, cousin of Zac. We kept them too, but had endless troubles with their swim bladders which helped us give them up as we didn't want to participate in supporting the fish breeding trade that bred such unnatural and unhealthy little fish.
