Re: Beanpaste

     Many years ago, I spent a few months teaching English in Tokyo. One of the first things I noticed was the delectable looking pastries in the window of a shop I passed on my way to the subway. There must have been hundreds of pastries (or so it seemed) and every one was different, each an exquisitely confected little marvel of sugar and dough in the form of animals, people, things. There were pastry villages and pastry people and every kind of animal imaginable. Being a lover of sweets, I couldn't wait to stop in the store. The first pastry I ate was filled with a mildly sweet, rather bland substance that I couldn't identify. It was okay, but didn't really live up to my expectations. The next day I bit into another one--same bland filling. Day after that...you guessed it. Despite the appearance of incredible variety, each and every one of those lovely little sweets was stuffed full of beanpaste.

     Nothing wrong with beanpaste, mind you, but why am I writing about this?

     Yesterday, I went up to the Mesa--where sadly there has been an explosion of kittens this autumn--to pick up a little six-week-old fellow that a kind-hearted homeowner had rescued. She had the little guy wrapped up in a towel and was cradling him in her arms. As she handed him to me to take to one of Feline Network's foster homes, I thanked her for taking care of him. She replied, "To me, he's a human being. He's just a human being in a different form."

     Which brings me back to the Japanese pastries. I'm lucky in that most of the people I meet in my volunteer work with feral cats are kind and compassionate like the woman on the Mesa. But the world is still populated with many who see animals as objects, to be used or discarded or ignored. Because animals don't have the dubious gift of language and the even more dubious gift of the awareness of their own inevitable deaths, they are devalued.

     The woman on the Mesa has it right. The same Life that animates humankind animates animals. A lost kitten, an abused dog, a pig on its way to the slaughterhouse, they're all imbued with the same Life, the same consciousness, that humans are. All that differs is the exterior form. We are all filled with the very same 'beanpaste."