Adul

Eyes closed or eyes open?
Heart closed or heart open?
Live for yourself or live for the planet?
Be aware or totally unaware?
Like an alarm clock went off, I awoke with a jolt my heart ready to be put into service. Now from here what I see is not always easy on my heart. Do I put it safely away to avoid the pain or do I use it to show that no matter what happens there is the possibility to love on this planet. No matter what I hear, what I see, how discouraging human behavior, there is still the possibility of love.
Ultimately that is my question. Can I see violence, can I see cruelty, continue to question why but not grow bitter? Can I know that humans can muck things up in a wide variety of shocking ways with so many rationalizations that if they were snow, I’d be buried under a mountain of it and still see a sliver of beauty, of hope that we humans can make it right? Like walking in a gooey thick syrupy molasses, I trudge through the messy disaster of orangutan conservation wondering what it takes to give everyone more compassion, more commitment to help each other, more understanding.
If I was just a little girl now instead of the woman I have aged into, I would cry because I wouldn’t know how to stop the cruelty. And as I am now the woman still with a child’s soul, then still I left with only tears because I want to stop cruelty and because even with my adult eyes and my adult mind, I still don’t know how to stop it.
You read along wondering what has brought the tears, the questions? Abdul, a rehabilitated orangutan, who lived in Bukit Lawang, was shot just a few days before I went there on my tour. Some farmer shot him with pellets. The clash between man and wildlife, farming and wildlife. And as there is no clinic nearby, Abdul was transported to a distant clinic and now a week or so later, he has died. Yea, died.
Lucy who helped rehabilitate him to acclimate him to living in the wild, says he was always a really sweet orangutan. So there it is. Abdul’s life. He’d been captured as a youth forced to live with humans, then rehabilitated by humans to live in the forest where he belongs and now shot dead. Dead.
What is going on? How in the world can orangutans survive if this is the best that we can do? How in the world can we clever humans living in sophisticated cultures with flushing toilets, ipods, TV programs that can find the next Idol, how can we collectively ignore how we are treating our one earth and all of her inhabitants?
If an orangutan was shot in your yard, would you ignore it? If it happened in your city park? So at what point is it too far away to be within your caring zone? Is there so much bad news, so much craziness in all directions that we ignore it all or stuff it into the bad news bag and try to believe that if we live “nicely” then that is sufficient?
How can we all wake each other up with such a big jolt that our hearts work right and our caring zone becomes the planet? We need something to wake us up. We need more than watching the news, which is practice at not caring. A nightly infusion of desensitizing yourself to world grossness. “Next hour we bring you the latest disaster from Asifyoucared, NY. Stay tuned.” We can’t just feel bad. We need hearts to care and in the caring things can change …even just a little bit would be such a good thing.
So tonight I’m in mourning for a big orange orangutan with a sweet disposition who had some freedom but now is dead. I’m going to write a sympathy card to the president of Indonesia and to the head of the forest service here in Indonesia. I’m going to say how sad I am that one of Indonesia’s treasured orangutans was killed living in the forest, killed living near the feeding station in Bukit Lawang. I’m going to tell them that I wish the laws to protect orangutans and Leuser National Park could be enforced. Maybe you will too?