animals

God’s eye view

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Let’s do something fun, shall we? We are going to imagine that we are God. We got bored sitting in our heavenly abode. So we decided to have some fun. Let’s go to Earth and check out how it is doing. We are excited to see the fruits of our hard work.

We put on our sneakers and descend towards Earth. Oh! What’s all this noise? Wow, humans are noisier than ever. What could possibly be creating such a din? Let us go down and see.

As we go further down, our eyes sting. What’s happening? Our eyes are on fire! Oh! Wait. It is the plumes of pollution clouding our vision. We can’t see at all! Oh, but we are God. So let us turn on our special goggle vision. That’s much better. We can see now.

We see trucks, cars and lots of light. Wow, this makes our heavenly abode look dark in comparison! Can we grab some of those string lights on our way back? Hey, focus Gods. Let’s remember that we are beyond glamour and greed. Onwards.

Wow, it’s really dirty around here. There’s so much trash. The trash combined with the smoke makes the air unbreathable. Luckily, being Gods, we don’t really need to breathe. But, can we go somewhere else, maybe a little bit outside of all this mayhem?

We start moving out of the city. On the way, we hear chants and prayers. What’s this? Oh, the humans are calling us, bowing to us and generally trying to make us feel good. Well! That’s nice! Thanks humans. But really, if you want us to feel good, can you please turn off those lamps and quieten the deafening noise? Also, we see that you have some beautiful structures, or places of worship, erected for us. That’s very sweet. But we much rather live where there is clean air and silence. Can you be so nice as to allow the homeless and the dogs right outside to move in? Please also give them that food you are offering. It’s a kind offer, but one that we must refuse for obvious reasons. We like food from nature and not that thingamabob that you put together. Please, don’t feel bad. We just like to keep our systems clean. We are God, remember?!

We travel further outside the city. Ah, here is some peace and quiet. We enter the forests. Finally, somewhere that we can rest for a bit. We move further into the peace and the darkness. We see animals. Yay! Finally. Creatures that make sense. They don’t actually pray to us. They never had to. We still like them. Look how fluffy they are?! Aww. We feel momentarily proud of our creation, before remembering that we are God, and must not have pride.

It’s night time, so we don’t see the animals in action. They are sensibly resting, recuperating for their following day’s routine. Night creatures are out and about, hunting, moving around. They see us. They like us, but they don’t talk much to us. A polite nod, and they are gone. We get the feeling that they consider us their equal. It’s a happy feeling.

We move. Oh, what’s this? We are dismayed. Big machines have been tearing our creation apart. We see trees cut down, areas burnt clean of the woods. We see animals moving further away from population. Wow, these humans are a bit off. They want to please us by erecting buildings in our name and offering us strange concoctions, but they cut down our own creation to build these structures. One would think that it would be obvious to them that we won’t like them cutting and decimating our creation. Remind me, fellow Gods? Were these the smartest beings on the planet? Why do we get the feeling that we messed up?

Feeling a bit sad, but controlling our feelings to keep the even Godly temperament, we move further out. Wow, we have barely been in the forests and there we see lights again. But, what’s this?! It’s a hundred times worse than the initial city we had descended into!

Wow, look at all those missiles flying around! What’s happening? We ask a passing human what’s going on? He takes one look at us, shrieks and faints. Oh no! What have we done? As we try to revive him, a dog goes by. He informs us that the country is at war over religion. The dog is not afraid of us. He tells us that he will take care of the fallen human. He tells us that the human was drunk. He then wishes us good luck for our onward journey!

We are baffled. A million questions come to us. A war? Over religion? Over us?! But we are the ultimate believers of peace and kindness. Our whole mantra is love for each other. And these people are fighting? Over us? We seem to be experiencing some serious design failures here!

We also wonder about the dog. He seemed smart and practical. The humans who we designed as the most intelligent of them all seems to be falling apart. And what is this drink the dog spoke about? Wow, we have missed a lot. Or surveillance team needs to tighten up.

Making a mental note to talk to the surveillance team, we move on. We see people warring, killing other humans, even babies in our name. Now, we are Gods, and I know we are not supposed to have feelings, but we feel a bit ashamed. This won’t do. We need to steady our emotions.

We move, looking for a respite. We see a human drinking from a bottle. Oh, this must be the magic drink the dog was talking about. We take a sip. Yikes!!! We splutter, spitting the drink out in all directions. This is poison. What have these humans been concocting in our absence?! They seem to be using their brains for all the wrong reasons.

A bit dejected, we move on. Oh, heaven! We are flying over the ocean. It is dark and quiet here. Hopefully we can spend some time to regain our composure. We fly, watching fishes and other deep sea creatures with our special night, water visions. Things are looking good. We do think those reefs look a bit sparse.

We see something else. Wow, what is this new translucent creature. We don’t remember making them. Let’s take a dive and look. We inspect the creature. It looks unfriendly. It doesn’t respond to us at all. As we poke and prod, it starts floating away. We grab it. To our horror it bursts and is hollow!

A passing shark laughs in amusement at our bewilderment. It informs us that it is not a creature at all. It is human generated plastic trash. We are confused. We try to look Godly and knowing. But the shark can see that we don’t get it. It leads us to a place where there is a large floating island of similar trash.

As we watch in horror, a turtle eats one of them. It is instantly in pain. We rush to it’s aid and extract it with our powers. The shark is not impressed. It tells us that it will be impressed the day the oceans get clean and no other creature has to meet such fate. It gives us a long, piercing look. We are momentarily scared. After all, it is a shark. Shark knows we are God, so it simply swims off. We realize that we are not going to get any veneration from these creatures!

We get out of the water. We are sad. We go to the tallest mountains, and fly over the massive rivers. Some places look ok. But a majority of the places are in ruins.

We also find that humans are in general angrier than other creatures. The animals only look ferocious when they hunt and on a few rare occasions. We find the humans beating each other up at the slightest provocation. Even an accident angers them. We also see that the more powerful beats up the lesser powerful. We see children beaten. We see women being hit. Oh no. This is a fundamental flaw. We meant for the women to be stronger on the inside and a little less strong than the man on the outside. But it seems that the inner strength has been forgotten and the women are suffering. Ulp!

We are saddened. We retreat to a place of worship. Maybe someone will be patient and answer our questions there without getting scared. We hope the poison drink has not taken ahold of the place of worship. We find a man the others call a priest.

We tap the priest gently. He looks startled, but luckily stays on his feet. He politely asks what he can do for us. We put our concerns and disappointments of the evening in front of him as succinctly as possible.

He smiles and informs us that this is the world that we created. We being Gods should have anticipated it. Us being surprised only brings to question our wisdom as Gods. As we mull over this, he pats us on our backs and tells us, “why don’t you go back to your heavenly abode? All is good and beautiful there. Let us deal with the matters of the Earth”. He hands us edible concoctions, bows to us and walks off.

We ascend back in silence.

Escape escapades

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Crazy cookie the chicken: Lately we chickens have been the most adventurous of the whole lot of creatures at Elf land. So I get to start the blog of the day.

Our humans have a double fence system to keep us chickens inside the property. There is an inside fence with a gate. This is followed by an outside fence with a second gate. One would think this is enough barricade to keep four squawking hens from leaving their land. Well, one would think wrong! Allow me to elaborate with a most exciting story.

One fine day, Lazy Laurie was pecking around near the fence, when she suddenly saw something from the corner of her eye. On the other side of the fence, from the depths of the neighbor’s yard, emerged two juiciest and yummiest looking worms! Lazy Laurie’s eyes popped right out! She sent me on a mission. I was to watch the neighbor’s yard for the next couple of days and report my findings regarding the viability of the neighbor’s yard for free ranging.

After just one day of observation, I was able to give most favorable reports of the neighbor’s yard to Lazy Laurie and my other sisters. Not only is the neighboring yard full of juicy worms, it also has unpecked, untouched flowers, grass blades, flies, you name it. It’s a haven, right in front of our eyes, lying wasted, waiting for our attention. But how would we get there?

“No problemo”, said Lazy Laurie with supreme self confidence. “A fence is simply an opportunity to try one’s jumping or digging skills”, she added. Lazy Laurie rocks. After carefully evaluating the inside fence, Lazy Laurie found a weakness in the design. There is a bench for the humans to sit on right by the fence. Under our admiring eyes, Lazy Laurie jumped on to the bench. She then proceeded to use the said bench as a launch pad to become airborne and land neatly in between the two fences. The rest of us quickly followed.

Once there, Lazy Laurie scouted the second fence, until she found a small hole in it. “Ahha”, said she. And in a thrice, we were out of the second fence and into the neighbor’s yard. Yumminess awaited us. We spent a blissful hour checking out the delicacies offered by the neighbors. We pulled worms, plucked flowers, caught flies and ran in the yard. It was so fun!

Lazy Laurie the chicken: Crazy Cookie is an optimist. She covered our escape. Let me bring the story back to earth and tell you what happened next. A bunch of youngsters from the neighbor’s house saw us! Luckily for us, and unluckily for them, they aren’t trained to catch us. We used our usual evasion tactics with great success with them. We darted about in all directions, while they tried to catch us. The young neighbors seem to love us. This isn’t surprising, humans usually love us in all forms. Alive, dead, on a stake, on grill, you name it! Since we preferred the option 1 (of staying alive) we weren’t about to let them catch us.

Things were going well for us. But then, this cute human rooster came by. He tried to catch us. My resolve weakened, and I froze for a second. He grabbed me (it’s spring time, we are broody, what can I say). I was proud (although a bit worried) to be the one to be grabbed! Luckily my human mom came by just then, and we were all taken back to our home and put in the safety of our coop. It was an exciting day. I penned a little poem in the memory of this adventure.

We the chickens loved the neighbor’s yard

We ate plenty of goodies, soft and hard

Until I was caught by the human rooster

Which was sad, but ooh! Such a confidence booster!

— Lazy Laurie

Kylo Ren the dog: I escaped too! The other day someone rang the doorbell. My mom was forgetful and she opened the door without locking me away. I ran to meet the stranger. I was going to get in my lean, mean mode. However, the visitor turned out to be a girl that looked like my Tanya. I got mellow at once and was wagging my tail and my entire butt around like a bumbling fool. But then I looked at the road. The sweet girl had come with a boy! He was waiting for her in the car. I was back to my mean self (in case you don’t know this, I don’t like boys). I growled and barked. Tanya held me by my collar but I strained to get away. Unluckily the visitors left and I was dragged back into the house.

Last but not the least, it was my birthday last Thursday. I turned 4! My family sang the “happy birthday” song. Oh joy! I went completely crazy with excitement! Tanya solemnly told me that I was four now and was no longer a boy, but a man(!). Leena said that she was going to call me Mr. Kylo from now onwards since I was grown up! I play-bit at their jaws to correct their misconceptions. I don’t intend to grow up any time soon. Before you leave, please don’t forget to check out the pictures below of my parents. I think I look a lot like my dad. He looked naughty (heh heh). But I have my mom’s classic German Shepherd coloring. You can say that I got the best of both my parents’ looks. You wouldn’t be wrong!