“Evermore in the world is this marvelous balance of beauty and disgust, magnificence and rats.”
(Ralph Waldo Emerson)
When asked, I can readily name the three things I love best in this world. In alphabetical order they are: photography, squirrels, and writing. (My love for the humans in my life occupies its own, singular space.) The three combine into one of the most satisfying uses of my time; to share the stories of the furballs in my life, illustrated with photographs, is more or less how both my writing and my photography came to fruition. It’s how I found my own little niche, so to speak.
Most days, it’s an easy, comfortable balance. I feed the wilds and my educational animals, I sit quietly and observe while wielding a camera, process the photographs, and then sit down and let the experiences flow out in words. But come “baby season”, once in spring and again in middle-to-late summer, I find that balance goes askew and there are far too many days when it’s all I can do to get everyone fed and work the long hours of my day job, let alone even feed my own Self.
It’s been a whirlwind since Labor Day weekend when we took in 3 grown squirrels with closed-head injuries, and in the following 2 weeks took in 6 individually-orphaned babies. I also squirrelnapped two teeny-tiny “mini foxers” when my subpermittee left them here to go on a long-planned vacation, and then took in one of our yearling yard pals who showed up gravely ill with a horrible, deep-seated facial abscess. When I’m not working 60-80 hours a week, I can handle far more than this with one hand tied behind my back, even though each one is a unique case and more than one required critical care. Now, when at last everyone is relatively stable, it occurs to me that while my cameras have accumulated photographs, there has been little to no time to process them. Not to mention that it is high time to finish the 2009 calendar for A Squirrel’s Tale; one of the ways my photography helps raise funds for my non-profit wildlife rehabilitation organization.
Ouch.
Writing, however, has not been so neglected. With our state wildlife rehabilitation organization’s conference looming and the recent finding of a deer with Chronic Wasting Disease in Michigan, my fingers have been busy preparing presentations and writing proposals; this particular always-fatal deer disease such an extremely serious matter that as president of our state wildlife rehabilitation organization it has taken up dozens of my own hours spent in conversations, even arguments, and trips to meetings and symposiums in order to gain the greatest understanding of all the issues that surround it in order to help our DNR meet this threat with all due reasonableness where the both the public and the wildlife rehabilitation community is concerned.
Being one who marks such things by the natural cycle, Friday night’s haunting realization that it is now another new year adds a sneaky, small portion of crankiness to a disposition whose patience has already been stretched to the breaking point by even more than those things already mentioned. And so I carve out the small sliver of space and time in which to write this piece. Though certainly nothing that will ever earn a Pulitzer prize in literature, at the same time it does win me back some semblance of my Self. For, like my little friend here, one must sometimes just hang on and remain observant.
