A friend asked me to write about the rabbit.
She meant The Rabbit that arrives in our neighborhood early spring. The one that brings a battalion of herself – replicas, that seem to peer from under every flowering bush. She steers them to our vegetable gardens, and encourages them to snarf tendrils of newly blossomed pea pods, lettuce and beans.
Her strong feet and back legs are like little elevators, hoisting and lowering her to whatever level she needs. The tops of her ears, all that is visible in the dense shrubbery, resemble seed pods, until they rotate, like furry audioscopes listening for what might be lurking.
Soon she’ll have another contingent hopping behind her. Due to short gestation, she can mate right after giving birth, and produce another brood within a month. She births at night, so she’s been dubbed The Moon Rabbit; during the new moon phase the moon too undergoes a transformation, and disappears for a time.
The gifts the Moon Rabbit offers us are repetition, change and transformation. Repetition, that is, how we learn as children from good parents and mentors. Change is what we learn to do because of our mistakes and successes. And transformation through life experience is how we keep becoming, over and over again.
Chinese folklore believes that female deities such as Aphrodite, Ishtar and Inanna live on the Moon under the Cassia Tree – the Golden Shower Tree, that after 4000 years still has the power to heal and renew itself endlessly.
Jean Cassidy 2023
NB
The Moon Rabbit and the girl, was a topic of discussion between the Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin, and the mission controllers in Houston right before the space capsule landed!
Here is an excerpt of their conversation:
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Photo credit: the DM Collection
art and education, poetry, prose poetry, short storyyyyy, wnc poetry, women writers, writing
Virginia
I love how important you make rabbits in our lives–because they are.
Lisa Bartoli
You make me smile, teach me something new, made me wonder or create vivid pictures in my mind through your writing, Jean. Today, you did all four. Thank you!