Alas, poor Bambi's Dad, I knew him.
Nope, it's deer skull on a pole.
Two years ago at CERN scientists confirmed the discovery of the Higgs Boson, a particle which allows other particles to have mass. It was mistakenly dubbed “the God particle” which scientists hated and non-scientists loved. One of the reasons physicists were unhappy was because they were continuously asked to describe the Higgs via metaphor. What’s it like? But physics doesn’t describe things with metaphor, it describes them with math. Our insistence on metaphor is an insistence that we be given a way to misunderstand a difficult concept. Which we love!
What we hate is biology, so we tart it up with so much metaphor that we can’t see the organisms underneath.
I have dogs and cats. None of them will cross a rainbow bridge, ever. (I would love to have a leprechaun which could cross a rainbow bridge, but my husband turned out to be just a regular guy with a smooth line and a cute hat.) They will die.
They will die because they don't live in a Forever Home, because that doesn’t exist. What the metaphor of the Forever Home does do is obscure one of the main responsibilities of having a pet, which is deciding when it is no longer living a good life, and then ending that life. Shelters are full of unadopted animals while people build debt and guilt and suffering, in part because they don’t want to fail the metaphor.
Women with postpartum depression don’t get the help they need because their biological reality stands in cold contrast to the metaphors of the miracle of birth and the precious angel. The reality loses, and the organism suffers. (I have two precious angels. They could scream so loud leaf blowers would hang their pipes in impotent shame.)
We spend limited resources and precious time to thwart aging and obscure death, because we have acquiesced to language that suggests those things are possible. But we are no more special than the plants in the ditch or the lizards on my deck. Color your hair, grow a flower, puff your little pink chin flap thing to attract love. That makes perfect sense. It’s the single best thing about biology!
I am aging. I’ll do that for awhile, I hope with some panache; then I’ll die. Good. That gift of the finite, the ending, the expiration, is what makes every moment before it something to squish around in with all the joy I can muster.