Red Fox - The Pity of It

Haiku

Summer moon over
mountains is white as the tip
of a fox's tail

Matsuo Basho

A Haiku about foxes by the great Basho. I wonder if Col's photos of our current garden foxes can inspire the rather less great MatSue to another Haiku?

Against all odds
the valiant fox
patrols our garden.

The thought behind that is how brave they are - existing, bringing up their children in this difficult world, this ruined paradise.  Though completely blameless, they have to live with the consequences of the rebellion in Eden and the subsequent refusal of most of us to listen to our Creator.  Apparently the great Matsuo himself found the fox a difficult subject and was not over thrilled by his Haiku above.  It is better than mine though.

My new regime of eye drops every hour is getting established and hopefully will do the trick. They have given me another appointment in a month's time, so clearly they are hopeful it will. Its all worrying - and I feel so tired.

This blog should be about the war that seems to have started with Israel attacking Iran and them retaliating... piling tragedy upon tragedy.  And presumably with the possibility of turning the Middle East into a nuclear wasteland!

But in a way the valiant fox, bringing up her children somehow, amidst the violence, the chaos, the habitat loss, and her cubs playing together on the lawn, as cubs have done since cubs (and greensward) began does speak of it, the sadness of it.

And it shows that we, the human family, have learnt nothing from our tragic past  - not even from two wars so terrible they are called World Wars.  Thomas Hardy wrote this brave poem just after the first world war broke out and great hatred was being fomented between the English and the Germans.

THE PITY OF IT

April 1915

Thomas Hardy

I walked in loamy Wessex lanes, afar

From rail-track and from highway, and I heard

In field and farmstead many an ancient word

Of local lineage like “Thu bist”, “Er war”,

“Ich woll”, “Er scholl”, and by-talk similar,

Nigh as they speak who in this month’s moon gird

At England’s very loins, thereunto spurred

By gangs whose glory threats and slaughters are.

Then seemed a Heart cyring: “Whosever they be

At root and bottom of this, who flung this flame

Between kin folk kin tongued even as are we,

“Sinister, ugly, lurid, be their fame;

May their familiars grow to shun their name,

And their brood perish everlastingly.”

Hardy was not able to believe in a Creator, but he certainly perceived the malevolent forces that pull the strings of the current world system. And they are not human hands by the way. Ephesians 6:12 spells it out for us so clearly when it tells us that: "we have a struggle, not against blood and flesh, but against the governments, against the authorities, against the world rulers of this darkness, against the wicked spirit forces in the heavenly places."

And isn't the aim of "the wicked spirit forces" to get brother hating and killing brother?  We must not let them, and isn't a very important part of our spiritual fight not to let "the world" divide us and make us hate each other?