I enjoy the creatures I feed the same way as you do the hummingbirds, as fascinating and beautiful creatures who don’t need me, other than enjoying what I provide them. But we are drawn inevitably closer together. I love to watch their interactions. If I step outside, the bluejays begin cawing to alert the whole woods that the new day’s food is coming. Of course I have to feed them after that! And the neighborhood cats outside make on me an even higher claim. Like The Little Prince’s fox wisely said, we become responsible forever for what we have tamed.

Life has changed. My disabled daughter kinda runs the house now, a situation we’re negotiating. I don’t let my other kids get away with half of what that dog got away with. If Ruby lived in this household now I would have had to take a more dominant role with her in order for us all to manage.

I do look forward to having more animals in my household but right now I’m in the process of rethinking everything. One thing I appreciate about the wild creatures that live in and visit the yard is that they don’t need me, except to not step on them when I’m in their space or otherwise do them harm. My world and the hummingbirds’ world overlapped on my back porch, but they really didn’t require much of me and they certainly didn’t need me to encourage them to migrate or to point out the way. That works for me. I wouldn’t take advice from them on certain matters, either.

Don’t tell me you aren’t the same way. I read your novel and the dog is obviously the star character! =)

“You can keep a dog; but it is the cat who keeps people, because cats find humans useful domestic animals.” George Mikes

http://images.channeladvisor.com/Sell/SSProfiles/20057992/Images/5070.jpg

Of course, by this definition, there are some drug dealers doing good, so it’s very hard to define. =)

Your description of victimizers who use free will astonishes me, for all the victimizers I’ve known do use force, but I suppose Satan is just like that. He never has to use force, just persuasion.

Doctors and nurses in hospitals are accustomed to use force on their patients, who may have willingly come in, but their agency is taken because they are sick. People in ICUs are often restrained to keep them from pulling the respirator tubes out of their mouths, or for other greusome reasons, and some of them get a psychosis which is similar to that of torture victims in prison camps. An ICU is sort of a chamber for torturing patients, in fact, with the only difference being the intent of the torturers purportedly being to return their victims to health. One’s body responds to being treated a certain way, and the intent of the one doing the treating is somewhat of a detail at that point.

Questioning ourselves, particularly when exercising godlike powers, is always in order. :)

I can’t say I know everything I need to know about God to make such a judgement. I DO know I don’t take such a direct role in things.

My feelings on the question of what my relationship is to the animals I interact are very unsettled. I would describe the stage I’m in now this way: I don’t think we know very much about ourselves (about humans) yet, let alone about what’s going on out there in the (brace yourself, Preston) rest of the natural world. I believe our stewardship ethic has a long ways to go to grow up, but if you ask me why I think that, I’d say because that’s the pattern in human development overall — that we don’t know as much as we think we do about ourselves or anything else and many times when we act in what we believe is good faith our best efforts result in trouble or even disaster. Sometimes we don’t even know enough to understand that’s what’s happening.

I’ve had animals petition me for help but have not known enough about an animal to know how to help it (http://www.motleyvision.org/?p=186). I’m not imaginative enough, I’m not creative enough, and, perhaps, because I struggle in how I handle my life overall, I don’t have time enough to act in full-bodied beneficence toward all the creatures who might take up with me, though I at least ask myself every day how I might do better.

Unlike God, I pick and choose the responsiblities I take on. This year I chose the hummingbirds, but I don’t think I’m anywhere near understanding how best to interact with them. I call them “my hummingbirds” or “our hummingbirds” not because I feel any sense of possession but because I have taken on the responsibility to understand them and to do the best for them I can, always looking forward to doing better. I am taking on ownership of some degree of responsibility for them.

I guess I would feel happy if in my interactions with animals or even other people I could approach the level of involvement of a Mother Theresa. But a god, or god-likeness? Not me, not by a long shot. IMO, in and of itself, feeding and caring for someone or something doesn’t signify god-like behavior. Child molesters who have kidnapped children often do that for their victims. They even say they “love” their victims. They provide for them, they clothe them, they love them; in some cases, they even say they’re rescuing their victims. Therefore, what they have done must be (in their minds) good.

Some kinds of victimizers allow their victims to roam freely and don’t actually hold them in physical captivity. They reason that if their victims return to them “of their own free will” that they must “want” or “need” bad treatment.

I watched my hummingbirds closely and will watch them when they return next year to see if my interactions with them are causing them harm in any way. In the meantime, I’ve been educating myself to increase the chances that I’ll be able to tell if I am. Between educating myself and close observation I’ll be able to do better than I have. I question myself about the business constantly, not just about the rightness of my actions but about the rightness of my motives.

Now there’s one thing I can say I am able to do with gusto and commitment: Question myself. Is that a god-like quality? Hmm.

I see God as also acting under a great number of constraints of various kinds, from the laws of physics to the things it is permissible to do to those in his power. The analogy holds up, for me. My cat Drive By would meow at me if her heating pad inadvertantly got turned off by a power blink, to ask me to turn it back on. She was fully aware that I could control the light and temperature in the house, the volume of music or lack of music, and a great number of other things. Sometimes cats think I have more control and influence than I do, as when my childhood cat, whom we allowed to go outdoors, would complain to me about the weather if it were raining or too cold, with complete faith that I could fix it for her. I wonder if we don’t do something similar, sometimes, when we pray to God that he should fix this or that thing which could be impossible by rules we don’t understand.

It’s funny that I think we (you and I, Patricia) can’t communicate with straight exposition, but must use stories. My view of God, for instance, allows that he can place a hurricane exactly where he wants it to be, or cause one person’s house to be miraculously saved from a hurricane. These things are possible (for an advanced being) given the laws of physics that we now know (random quantum fluctuations of the vacuum plus the butterfly effect from chaos theory). Perhaps in your view, God doesn’t take such a direct role in things.

Tonight there was a mother racoon, with two babies tagging behind her. They are so adorable! She was continuing the tradition of generations of her family, I’m sure, teaching them about the magic bowls that refill with Purina Cat Chow each day. Actually they know that it’s me doing it, and even where I sit in my house, as I discovered one night when I forgot to put food out, and was sitting in a part of the house around the other side from where the food bowls are, and one racoon jumped up and whammed the window beside my chair, causing me to jump. It was as if she was saying “Hey, you in there! Don’t forget the food! What’s with the slow service tonight?” =)

The little ones always cause me to refill the bowls if they are empty. I can’t turn them away hungry! But even in that I am acting as a god. The population increases, and if I don’t continue to feed them, some will starve. Some starve anyway, and sometimes there are fights. Sometimes I find the area around the bowls is stained with blood, and I mourn. Gods provide, and they act in love to make lives easier and healthier, but they can’t make sorrow and loss not exist.