carrotblog

To where can I flee that my shadow will not find me?

I am wandering, without home, weeping vulnerable on life's way. From Cumbria across channels and Mourne mountains, my shadow travels before me until I find my sanctuary in the Silent Valley. Behind the mountains, I espy the Spelga Dam and in my company, the Craggy Binnian to the East and the Cliffs of Slievenag Lough to the west. Northwards lies Mount Doon which I have scaled in rain and Ben Crom, a mountain I am fond of.

Yet the valley is not a mountain and its modest silence beckons me in solitude. Enchanted by its spell, I call this my Silent Valley. Here I undress my shadows and my orange frock...... Lo! When I am naked and exposed, in my own skin I am comfortable and there are no shadows. My shadow has left me as i am standing alone, naked and bare at the Silent Valley where no I sees me unhidden. Seen or unseen, I know i am found. This is enough to know. Enough in knowing to carry on my journey and these burdens for a while.

Somedays, I am shallow. Shallow deep shallow soft shallow skin-deep shallow unlike the deep valley reservoir waters behind me. How can my shallowness compare to the great depths of your Silent Valley waters? It is churlish to compare as my comparison drowns in the deep dark recesses of your great waters! All that lies here is skin-deep and shallow. Shallow shallow shallow is how I feel today. Yet naked and vulnerable as I am, deepness in depth lies behind my shallowness. This much I know without thinking. See how happy I am to be shallow today. See! See how I smile in a state of undress. Can you feel my happiness when you look at my shallowness in your own way? No.... you can not see because you don't look! There is no need for thinking deeply for there is silence. See!



Today I am freed from thinking and today, I am comfortable in my own skin. Shadows take flight and their silent screams drown in the sound and depths of the Silent Valley.

In the Silent Valley, silence is here. Silence is everywhere. Only if we were to pray for ears to hear it. I am here in silence, standing naked in awe and I shall remember this day.

Today, morning has broken. Some days shadows are long...

When did I discover my shadow? Or did it discover me?

The self to self contradiction bears no light and this is not a happy bunny. What can a rabbit hold in mind, without pouring over into the shadow side?

Without sly foxes, I move about freely outside. Inside, in mind I hold my own thought, inside out. The good bunny eats all his carrrots. The bad rabbit...in shadows, the rampant rabbit resurfaces.

How can I be good and bad all the same? At the same time? Here I am, as if morality was a mere figment of my imagination, relative and as dispensible as a carrot. I am here, but behold my shadow side!

In life I love, and in shadows, well who knows what the mind cannot see? In my wanderings, I have come to know that the shadow side exists. Were I to deny it and feign indifference to my shadow side, to whom would my shadow befall?

Rampant rabbit - there is no other.

In the light I am blinded by my own light. In the morning when I am broken, my shadow comes to life. What is this shadow that follows me and what I have I left behind, in discovering such darkness?

Is it the shadow of my own self-centre, which compels me to seek something other than my self?

Who knows. Today this shadow feels like it's going to be very long.

From out of a nature reserve in the Lake District, Carrotblog is the live journal of an itinerant rabbit in search of something in the wilderness of civilisation.

Carrotblog starts off in the home of Blea Tarn, The English Lake District, stewarded by the National Trust. Unlike Shelley and the modern day Frankenstein, Carrotblog is not a cobbled creation of misfitting parts, but a stereotyped imitation of a natural species, without the monstrous imaginings of a modern day science-fiction creator. Here, her vital signs have been edited with a new breathe of life. A visit to a country doctor for a health check confirms that Carrotblog has no features of contemporary Avian flu'. The initiated can well tell. However Miffy's Shelley is no fantasist of Victorian mythology and deems that Miffy shows early signs of suffering from close proximity of those with foot-in-mouth disease.

Faced with such a terrible prognosis and outcome, our doctor prescribes Carrotblog time away from the stifling atmosphere: travel. To stay locked in the asphyxiating social nexus, no matter how beautiful her surroundings, condemns Carrotblog to a Camusian eternity of trivial gossip about English football and television, social banter of the order usually found in wombles. Carrotblog then elects to leave for an itinerant lifestyle.

In this blog, Carrotblog is fortunate enough to employ the services of a freelance photographer to document her travels, however finds that modern life is very entrenched in the show-and-tell philosophy of unreflection. Some of this blog is accompanied by photographs when appropriate. Unlike the masses of rabbits, crudely popularised by the counter-culture in terms of rabbit population statistics, Rabbitblogs distinction comes to us, not as a rampant rabbit, but as a 'reflecting rabbit'.

Over to Rabbitblog now.