{"id":131,"date":"2008-12-12T10:13:33","date_gmt":"2008-12-12T14:13:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogshevik.com\/garneredimages\/?p=131"},"modified":"2008-12-12T10:13:33","modified_gmt":"2008-12-12T14:13:33","slug":"returning-to-the-beginning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/squirreltale.com\/garneredimages\/?p=131","title":{"rendered":"Returning To The Beginning"},"content":{"rendered":"

“The nature of God is a circle of which the center is everywhere and the circumference is nowhere.”
\n(Empedocles)<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n

I was a photographer before I became a wildlife rehabilitator.\u00a0 Yet it was becoming a wildlife rehabilitator that pushed my photography to the prominent level in my life at which it exists today.\u00a0 I\u00a0suppose you could say\u00a0that in more than one way it started small,\u00a0documenting all the tiny, precious\u00a0lives that came through my door.\u00a0\u00a0As they grew up and moved out, it\u00a0naturally expanded to documenting the rest of the world, with an emphasis on wildlife and nature.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0wildlife rehabilitation is recorded at A Squirrel’s Tale<\/a>, where such things belong, yet this is a case where I would be remiss to not write about it here.\u00a0 For as it always goes, there has come a point in time where life has come full circle.<\/p>\n

But let me start at the beginning.<\/p>\n

Nine years ago I found a baby squirrel who ended up not being releaseable.\u00a0 She was also my most beloved familiar, something that was immediately obvious to her\u00a0but took me time to fully understand.\u00a0 She grew up in front of my camera’s lens; a small, fur-covered ham perfectly at ease in the spotlight, and perfectly comfortable with her role as an ambassador for wildlife and wildlife rehabilitation.\u00a0 When she died of cancer last summer, in\u00a0one entirely too-small and therefore\u00a0woefully inadequate word, I was devastated.\u00a0 It is impossible to describe the aching emptiness\u00a0that still\u00a0exists inside of me\u00a0and I suppose my reaction to it was the same as\u00a0most who have\u00a0suffered a similar loss – I ignored it.\u00a0 For months I simply avoided her cage, never cleaning it out, really not even looking it at.<\/p>\n

I have always known and always trusted that Time is a healer and so it was that as the months have passed it\u00a0did become\u00a0easier to bear the dreadful change in routine, the choking silence that replaced Sunny’s merry little grunty-oofing calls and the singular sounds of her climbing around inside her cage that used to emanate from the corner of the dining room.\u00a0 And the fall babies grew up, necessitating the requisite shuffling as they were moved into bigger pens for the winter and thereby bringing a semblance of normalcy back to the house.\u00a0\u00a0This left\u00a0only little George Staples in a big cage that still sat in a temporary spot and the 3 “mini” fox squirrels who needed to be moved into a big cage to overwinter indoors.<\/p>\n

In my heart of hearts, I knew what needed to be done next but it took a while to actually force my Self to do it.\u00a0 I cried as I removed Sunny’s\u00a0long-empty food dish from her cage, then again\u00a0when I took out her bed.\u00a0 There were more tears as I cleaned\u00a0her cage\u00a0thoroughly and set it up for its new resident.<\/p>\n

George Staples would be the lucky recipient of Sunny’s “prime location” for the educational animals here and I was both surprised and my intuitive decision confirmed when he took to his new digs without the slightest bit of concern or fuss that is normal for ever-status-quo-preferring squirrels.\u00a0 Indeed, it is as if he belongs there in the same way that Sunny did; he is utterly content and his behaviors are as if this had been his post-weaning home all along.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

The adjustment has been harder for me.\u00a0 As George scrambled around the cage exploring that first evening, the comfortingly familiar sound that has gone unheard for 5 and a half months\u00a0shot through\u00a0my heart like an arrow.\u00a0 There was a fleeting sense of time folding back upon itself, yet\u00a0an intellectual\u00a0pang that such a thing is not possible.\u00a0 I was not going to turn around and see Sunny’s beloved little face grinning at me and while George Staples is a “talker”,\u00a0it isn’t his way to\u00a0vocally beg for anything the way that Sunny always did.<\/p>\n

I pulled out the camera to record this momentous day in George’s life, and it was then that thoughts about the circle of life began to bubble up.\u00a0 This was how what is now such a large part of\u00a0my life began 9 years ago and in its inevitable and inexorable way, yet another\u00a0new cycle begins again.<\/p>\n

I can only hope that this next one contains the same enormous\u00a0quantity of love and joy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“The nature of God is a circle of which the center is everywhere and the circumference is nowhere.” (Empedocles) \u00a0\u00a0 I was a photographer before I became a wildlife rehabilitator.\u00a0 Yet it was becoming a wildlife rehabilitator that pushed my photography to the prominent level in my life at which it exists today.\u00a0 I\u00a0suppose you […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/squirreltale.com\/garneredimages\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/squirreltale.com\/garneredimages\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/squirreltale.com\/garneredimages\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/squirreltale.com\/garneredimages\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/squirreltale.com\/garneredimages\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=131"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/squirreltale.com\/garneredimages\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/squirreltale.com\/garneredimages\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=131"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/squirreltale.com\/garneredimages\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=131"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/squirreltale.com\/garneredimages\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=131"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}