The inanimate

Saturday 27th February

By dropping the animals-are-useful model, we step into a world of imagination where we can imagine the animated soul in things, not just in humans, not just in animals, but in everything. By seeing that there is a soul (or whatever you call it) in everything we show it as worthy of respect. Worthy enough for us to grant it some attention.
One of the most beautiful objects anyone could aspire to own and use is a flute. A human can be “risen up” by the wonderful flow between themselves and this musical object. Here might be an example of the inanimate becoming animate - flute responding to flautist. The object comes alive, not like an animal but in another no less convincing way. Objects can be beloved because we can have what feels like a relationship with them - our car, cat, kids, money, mirror. Take a mirror for example. It responds to me by showing me my face and that makes a mirror a useful item. Or other things we can get attached to, like my bike. The object speaks to me and if I fail to listen, if I don’t ‘hear’, if I don’t maintain it properly, the brake cable quietly rusts away and snaps at the worst possible moment. I suffer the consequences.
Our attitude towards our inanimate possessions is a template for how we deal with the sentient beings in our care. If we’re careless with the things we own it’s likely we’re not too sensitive about the living beings in our care.