Recently I saw a touching video about a pig named Emma.
The video was made by a farmer named John Chester who tells the dramatic birthing story of a mama pig named Emma who lives on his farm at Apricot Lane Farms in California, and very nearly died after the birthing 13 piglets.
Now, if you love animals as I do, this video will be a must-see for you just because the pigs are just so darn cute!
But a funny thing happened to me when I watched this video that was unexpected and additional to the cute-factor: I felt interconnection with a pig.
In the video we watch the story unfold of how Emma gives birth to these 13 piglets, but then quickly deteriorates due to a high fever and no appetite to the point that she is unable to care for her babies and it looks like she might die.
Fast forward, the farmer then decides to reverse his decision to have his human friends take care of the piglets with bottles of milk, and instead gives the responsibility back to Emma. And what happens you ask?
According to an article in the Huffington Post from February 24, 2015 called “This Mama Pig Was On The Brink Of Death -- Until Her Own Piglets Saved Her:”
Moments after reuniting with her piglets, Emma's condition seemed to improve. Slowly, she stood and walked over to a trough to eat.
The farmer, John Chester, was quoted in the article as saying:
If I hadn't seen this with my own eyes, I would have never believed it …I like to think Emma was saved by us, but it's so obvious that she was saved by her calling…In her case, it was to be a mom...Some might say that the very thing that could threaten to take us down in life can, at times, be the one thing that keeps us alive.
When I had both my children, I too had complications- in the pregnancy, in the birth, and in the post-partum period. Like Emma though, I too believe my recovery was aided not only by modern western medicine, but also by the primal—animal—connection to my children.
I’ll tell you, having this moment of such visceral interconnection with a pig in regards to one of the most difficult and vulnerable periods in my life was, to be frank, quite odd and unexpected.
The interesting thing is, it happened again not long after.
I was reading a book called True Refuge by Tara Brach, and in the book Ms. Brach referred to a quote by another author named Fran Peavey in her book Heart Politics.
In the quote, Ms. Peavey describes her own real-life example of interconnection with a chimpanzee.
One day I was walking through the Stanford University campus with a friend when I saw a crowd of people with cameras and video equipment on a little hillside. They were clustered around a pair of chimpanzees - a male running loose and a female on a chain about twenty-five feet long. It turned out the male was from Marine World and the female was being studied for something or other at Stanford. The spectators were scientists and publicity people trying to get them to mate.
The male was eager. He grunted and grabbed the female's chain and tugged. She whimpered and backed away. He pulled again. She pulled back. Watching the chimps' faces, I [a woman] began to feel sympathy for the female.
Suddenly the female chimp yanked her chain out of the male's grasp. To my amazement, she walked through the crowd, straight over to me, and took my hand. Then she led me across the circle to the only other two women in the crowd, and she joined hands with one of them. The three of us stood together in a circle. I remember the feeling of that rough palm against mine. The little chimp had recognized us and reached out across all the years of evolution to form her own support group.
I love this story.
In part, because I am a woman too, and the theme of female interconnection is so moving, but also because the experience of reading about Ms. Peavey’s moment of interconnection with an animal had been on the coat tails of my own experience with Emma the pig. Now it was twice that I was noticing interconnection with animals.
About a year ago I wrote a blog called “Spiritual Life Stages” in which I talked about phases or “Acts” (like in a play) of spiritual development in my own particular journey. I named the current spiritual stage that I am in right now: “Act III: We Are: Community” with the primary spiritual task being: interconnection.
However, when I identified this spiritual undertaking or mission I realize now I was not, to use a popular phrase of the 1990’s, thinking outside the box.
At that time, I had had a narrow view of interconnection that was restricted to only people, and I now see how very small I was conceptualizing this spiritual endeavor.
I do not judge myself for this near miss in my spiritual development. The philosophy of dialectics, of which I am a very committed student, tells us that it takes intention and practice to ask ourselves “what might I be leaving out?”
Our oh-so-human brains can very easily, habitually and automatically narrow the focus of our attention without our awareness.
There is a great video available on YouTube that captures this truth so perfectly.
I don’t want to give away too much, but if you Google “Awareness Test” you will be directed to a 1 minute 7 second Australian public service announcement that visually demonstrates far better than words ever could how unsophisticated our brains are in many ways in the fact that one area of our brain may not always communicate well with another area of our brain unless we intentionally practice bringing the two (billion) areas together.
It’s interesting too, because now that I am making an effort to “think outside the box” of what interconnection means and with whom (or what) the experience can occur, you guessed it, I am experiencing interconnection with more and more unexpected sources.
Two quick examples.
One new experience of interconnection is happening with this very blog.
I began this blog in the summer of 2014 mainly because I noticed my mind was filling up with words and ideas and connections that I needed to organize and put out there in order to maintain my sanity. Plus, I couldn’t keep filling up my friends’ email inboxes with long ramblings about my spiritual life.
(And a relevant sidebar is to note that I am probably one of the least technically savvy people that you could possibly meet.)
So I decided to start writing a blog.
However, unexpectedly, well over a year into writing this blog I learned that the blog site itself would tell me from which countries around the world someone might be looking at my blog from.
To me, this was very exciting.
I began to keep a list of all of the countries that were being shown to have viewed this blog. They included:
Germany
Romania
Mexico
Canada
France
Ukraine
Singapore
China
Russia
USA
Australia
Sweden
Romania, and most recently
Poland.
I love this list. I love its diversity and inter-hemispheric quality.
Now, whenever I see a new country listed, I imagine a map of the world on my wall, and I can visualize another string connecting me, in New England in the United States, to someone else in another country, or continent, or hemisphere, and I feel a deep sense of interconnection.
One more example of unexpected interconnection with inanimate objects.
Awareness of interconnection with inanimate objects happened just this past week, and was precipitated by a poem by David Whyte called: “Everything is Waiting for You” that goes like this:
Your great mistake — Your great mistake is to act the drama
as if you were alone. Your great mistake is to act the drama
as if you were alone. As if life
were a progressive and cunning crime
with no witness to the tiny hidden
transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny
the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,
even you, at times, have felt the grand array;
the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding
out your solo voice
You must note
the way the soap dish enables you,
or the window latch grants you courage.
Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity. Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.
The stairs are your mentor of things
to come, the doors have always been there
to frighten you and invite you,
and the tiny speaker in the phone
is your dream-ladder to divinity.
The tiny speaker in the phone
is your dream-ladder to divinity.
Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into
the conversation. The kettle is singing
even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots
have left their arrogant aloofness and
seen the good in you at last. All the birds
and creatures of the world are unutterably
themselves. Everything, everything, everything is waiting for you.
A soap dish. A window latch. A kettle. Now, I am really thinking outside the box. And yet, does not this chair I am sitting on hold up my backside? Does not this floor keep me from falling down?
Interconnection with inanimate objects is in some ways extraordinarily comforting because god knows, they are everywhere!
And one of the many great fruits of noticing interconnection is, at least for me anyway, gratitude tends to immediately follow.
What are the unexpected sources of your experiences of interconnection?
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