Scrub-a-dub-dub, three--wha?

By the time the sun set tonight, the ducks were on a downward spiral. They drank a little, but then went back to huddling down on the ground trying to keep themselves warm under their feathers. It's hard to see a duck's feet on the cold hard snow in winter without shivering oneself. I walked over and picked one up--no objection. I carried him into the house and put him in the bathtub. He began to drink the tepid water even before I set him down on it! I went back out for the other male, and then picked up the smaller female and brought her in with her friends. Look at the water shaking around them! I could hear their claws on the bottom of the tub going clickety clickety clack as they paddled for no real reason. Their eyes were wide open, unlike when they were outside wincing. They began softly to talk to each other, little chirpish squeezebox-like caressing syllables comparing their happiness at having suddenly found themselves in Heaven.

Muscovie ducks originated near Moscow. However did they get through those harsh winters? Nature has no mercy, no commitment to making an individual of a species happy as well as able to procreate before she dies.

What about us humans? Are we like Muscovie ducks able to survive a harsh environment with misery as a daily diet and survival the best goal? Does our fate differ from country to country or habitat to habitat?

Maybe that's why so many cultures have stories about a paradise lost. Maybe we all carry a sense that at some point we will be picked up from the harsh cold that has us cringing and calling up our best resources to bear it and placed in someplace with warmth and plenty and a cessation of misery.

Many of us see death as the magic messenger that frees us and shows us the way to Paradise. Some of us strive to detach, to cease wanting, to "live in the moment," because only by taking moments one by one can we bear them at all. It's almost like we were not meant to bear life, but we must, and to survive it (as it were) we must place ourselves in blinders so that it doesn't come at us all at once. Maybe that's why we invented time, the ordering of events, so that we could bear the weight of life.

I envied the ducks today. As I carried them I realized that my mittens had gotten layered over and over with dampness from trying to water the livestock and let them drink their fill before their buckets froze over. Each layer of dampness froze without drying, until my hands were each encased in balls of ice. Oddly, my insulating ice balls were warmer than the air around me!

Not long after, a friend pulled into the driveway and got out of her car and dug right into the task of comforting our frozen friends of the outdoors. She held gates for me, helped me break hay bales open and keep track of the twine, encouraged the 4-month-old filly to follow the herd to the barn, lifted heavy buckets up high enough so that the precious water would not be kicked over before it froze into a block of ice. Our lungs hurt and our tears froze on the rims of our eyes before they had a chance to evaporate (or fall). Our chins locked us into odd word formations as the muscles in our faces stiffened. I did not expect my friend, but she came to see how we were all doing. Her presence was to me what my gentle lifting hands were to my ducks. She showed me a warmth and sustenance in her caring companionship.

Maybe that's all any of us can do. I lift ducks, my friend lifts me. I lift my children, and they someday will probably find themselves astonishingly lifting both their parents. My neighbors are grieving and I bring them home-made pasta. I have shoulder surgery and my friends feed the horses. It's all the same.

It's all about helping other beings find Paradise.