My mum died unexpectedly a few weeks ago.
I’ve felt immense loss and shock at her sudden passing.
Mostly - as I have been sorting through her paperwork & photos - I have felt gratitude on her behalf: gratitude that for a great deal of her life, she got to live it on her own terms.
Since I was a child, I have found myself driven to restore equality/balance, wherever I perceived injustice, in my own very small ways…
My charitable efforts to empower HUMANS that were struggling (and against whom the odds had been stacked) evolved organically into a powerful passion and respect for EVERY form of life on this beautiful planet of ours: plant, animal, fish, fungi and on and on…
We are all connected: energetically & biologically.
My mum got to live life on her own terms. She had a house to live in and food on the table.
She had family who loved her & she was neither persecuted nor marginalised. She died without suffering.
My last few years of humanitarian and animal welfare work have greatly helped me to make peace with mum’s death because she was gifted choices & luxuries that so many of the lives that I’ve been focusing on, aren’t - and I count all forms of life in this, as well as human, from fern to fish to fowl - and so I have coped with her passing by recognising that she lived a much better life than most and as the days have passed (and I have been dealing with the typical processes of seeing to her house/estate) the dominating emotion has been a renewed conviction in my work to restore wild nature/ecological balance/equal rights for humans & animals, for all lives to benefit from.
We HUMANS - in general - have forgotten that we are wild beings too but I think that quite a few of us are starting to remember. There are also millions of us across our planet striving to live more compassionately, more tolerantly and more lovingly & I very much hope that I can become wiser and more capable (as I learn) each & every day, to be enabled to contribute effectively to this more open hearted human community, as we all evolve.
For every lab animal whose choices and freedom have been denied them, I want to help shape a more balanced world where we recognise those animals as ‘people’ with their own independent lives to lead, instead of ‘objects’ to be used in testing.
For every farm animal who never walks on grass/is born and dies in a cage or whose babies are taken from them, I want to restore humanity to a greater understanding that ALL species are equal and that we don’t need such cruel practices inflicted on animals/birds/fish that we have labelled as ‘stock’ in order to survive.
Wild foxes, hedgehogs, squirrels, birds and insects (to name a minuscule few) are suffering from loss of habitat, food and human ignorance and (therefore) persecution.
None of this is necessary. Should we choose to, we can harmoniously co-exist, survive AND thrive (as species) together.
I loved my mum very much. I will miss her greatly. She was MY mum. But she was also ONLY one single life (out of the trillions that have existed/will go on to exist) on this wonderful earth and she died because we ALL of us will die and she had it so much easier than most of the lives (human lives, spiky lives, furry lives, buzzing lives, feathery lives) that I have been working to empower (and even the odds for) the last few years.
So thank you mum for everything you did for me and for also allowing me (in my loss) to recognise that we all deserve a fair chance: a home/habitat to call our own, a family/community to love us, respect and compassion and the FREEDOM to live our lives to the max (on our own terms) for as long as we’ve got.
We all die, none of us can escape that. It’s HOW we get to live that matters: a life that we can call OUR OWN…
Thank you so much for reading, Alana xxx