Shards of Consciousness

When the world was young and I had more time on my hands I used to visit the zoo in Pittsburgh. When I first started going, before I left I would feel like crying. It appeared to be more of a prison than a zoo. First built a hundred years ago, many of the animals were kept in cages that were small relative to their size. The orangutans put me in mind of nothing more than men who had been put in cells for reasons they could not fathom, and after years of fighting their fate, had given up.

Then, in the 1980s, the zoo underwent a major renovation. More naturalistic exhibits were constructed that allowed the animals room to roam and to be indoors or outdoors as they desired. Most of the animals took to their newfound freedom with ease, wandering the acres of their habitat, feeding, bathing, rolling in the dirt, watching the people watching them.

Except for one giraffe. Raised indoors, never experiencing life under the open sky without walls and a ceiling around him, for a long time that one giraffe refused to leave his building. The door would be left open for him. Attendants would try to coax him outside. Nothing worked. Each morning he would watch his fellows walk out the open door. He could see the spaciousness and the sky beyond. They would amble out of his sight. Each evening he would watch them return, safe, well fed from grazing the treetops, probably muttering in their giraffish way of the tender leaves they had found, the sun on their skin, and the strange creatures who often lined up along the fences that edged their plain. But never would he cross that line between house and the open. It was an unknown. What danger may be waiting?

But finally, finally he made the great transition. Why? We don't know. All we know is that one day he left his shelter and felt the sun on his face for himself. He saw the open sky with clouds gliding within it. He felt the breeze caress his skin, and sensed the sounds of a world that had always been closed to him before, sounds he had never heard because he feared to leave his safe shelter of four walls, a roof, and bars to keep him from the strange creatures that, as his fellows had said, also lined the fences that surrounded the vast expanse of open plain upon which he found himself.

That day he discovered the taste of leaves that yet held the sap of the tree upon which they grew, and the taste of water that gathered the scent of the earth as it gurgled its way from unknown to unknown.

That night he returned with his fellows to the shelter of the building in which he was raised, but each morning thereafter he would make the walk through the door into the wider world of the plain, fenced though it was.

Not all days were perfect. He learned to stay beneath a tree as shelter from the rain. Some days the breezes would become winds that bit with cold. Other days snows would fall, leading all the giraffes to seek the shelter and warmth of their house. Never again, though, was he confined to four walls and a roof.

As I watch him I ask myself, "Does he now wonder what lies beyond the fence lined by strange creatures that seem to do nothing but watch?"

Image: FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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