Silflay is feeding time, or to be more precise, “to eat outdoors” in Lapine, the language the rabbits speak!
For the past few weeks, a arctic hare has been eating breakfast in our garden. We call it “our little gardener” because it takes care of our raspberries and cuts our grass. So far it hasn’t touched any vegetables, but it thinks cornflowers are really tasty!
This arctic hare is unusually fearless. We can do our gardening without disturbing it, when we make small talk with it it looks at us for a moment, as if considering a response, but instead continues to eat, it seems to have a higher priority.
My thoughts go to Watership Down, the wonderful novel that Richard Adams wrote and published in 1972. Considered by many literary experts as one of the world’s 100 best books. I read it in the seventies and loved it. The story of Hazel, Fiver and the other rabbits in a colony whose meadows, their whole world, are threatened by human progress and who set out to find a new home for the colony.
If you haven’t read the book (but you should…) you may have seen the movie. Where the theme song, Bright Eyes is sung by Art Garfunkel.
In the time we live in now, the story feels awfully topical. We are the rabbits on the run and at the same time the man who threatens all living things on the only planet we have… How and where will we find our thriving meadows.
