Do No Harm. Ahimsa!

Today I came home from work and started tapping at my keyboard. My busy friend the cardinal should have been tapping at the window too...but wait, wait!...silence. Where is he?

Suddenly, with fear and loathing in my heart, I remembered seeing a great big smug-looking cat in the yard in the morning before I left for work. In retrospect, I would say he was eerily calm. When I left the house, my cardinal was furiously battering his head against the window with all his might, happy as a clam. I had set out some decorations for him for the day...a little picture on the windowsill,a small jade Buddha in the southwest corner of the window for feng-shui and good fortune, a few pretty pillows arranged carefully on the couch inside the window, and my shoes nearby, to remind him of me.

I still had not taken the big step. I still was enabling him to live his treacherous lifestyle, allowing him to "fulfill his destiny". I thought perhaps his pecks on the window were sounding softer, as if his beak were getting worn down. I thought fleetingly of taking the big step of going outside and nailing up an old sheet over the window- (the one on the inside hadn't worked)- thus blocking my view and his destiny.

So it's possible I have done more harm than good, a sin of omission rather than commission. There is a word in Buddhism for doing no harm, not even to microorganisms. "Ahimsa", say certain monks, as they gently dust the ground in front of their feet before they take a step, as I should have said. Instead I have allowed my dear simpleton cardinal to catch the attention of the nasty neighborhood tomcat, who may have taken advantage of the situation, and done'im in. Ah but that's life - endless endless endless cause and effect.

I'll know for sure tomorrow at sun-up. If he's not there, I'm going to have to look in the yard for a few of his little bones and feathers. I'll set them on a sunny window ledge, grieve a bit, and cherish occasional cheery thoughts of his misbegotten, woebegone, yet earnest little life.