A two hare day

I mentioned the robin book? Well, my sister also gave me two hare books. One was the one I have read (I didn't tell her). But I did tell my brother and sister-in-law a few days later when I received from then another copy of Raising Hare! I need to do some re-gifting.

No photos of hares, so don't worry that you couldn't see one on that front-page image. And it's not a hare's form either - it's a muntjac's scrape.

Nor is there a hare here. Instead, my (cold) picnic by Kairos.

While sitting with the tree, I was thinking about the requirement in all real relationships for the other to be able to resist, refuse, and rubbish and claims presented to them. If the other cannot countermand or contradict, the relationship is false.

Then I was thinking about what it is in my relationship with the tree, or a real Indigenous person's relationship with the more-than-human that guarantees this. Because, of course, the view of such interactions through the lens of modernity-coloniality is that they are illusions, delusions, or projections.

And I think the constraint, the friction, comes from knowing the other as an other - through"knowledge" of the tree/other as a certain type of being. So, Indigenous people know all about the land, plants, and animals where they live. For us in the world of modernity-coloniality, much of that knowledge comes from "education" - botany, natural history, conservation etc. And also from paying careful attention... indeed, it requires a kind of Goethean approach to the tree. Otherwise, you just project, there is no friction, it's just another example of wish-fulfilment.

And then I thought, the way to combat anthropocentrism is to engage, plurally, in many relationships with non-human others, who, because they retain the right to resist etc by being "themselves" not some dream-vision we have of them, offer a way of thinking that is no longer human-centred.

I figured, it's far from "reflecting" ourselves back to us. But maybe it's even MORE than the post-humanist conception of "diffraction"... they must be able to completely overwhelm whatever pattern we approach them with.

Anyway, I left the tree after these deep thoughts and saw one hare racing across the field and another loping deeper into the wood. The first was red-brown; the second very brindled - and I think the same one I saw when I spotted the pigeon killed by the sparrowhawk.