“Elephants are Contagious.” – Paul Éluard
There is something about elephants.
Of his own accord, my sweet nephew started loving elephants basically as soon as he could say the word.
The birth of baby elephants at the Portland, Oregon, USA zoo is always a huge deal.
Going to the Madrid, Spain Zoo with one hundred first graders, found two hundred little eyes glued to the humungous, yet gentle creatures.
I think we can learn something from elephants.
They might be the most intriguing of animals, yet they are an animal void of color. Gray.
Think of all the gorgeous animals that are vivid and piercing. Orange and white, jagged tiger stripes hiding in tall green grasses and squishy clown fish hiding in sea oeneome.
Consider peacock and parrot feathers, scaley reptile patterns, and the millions of life forms, known and unknown, filling our oceans and seas. And this is barely scraping the surface of incredibly colorful creatures.
Elephants should go unnoticed, in their earthy and voided tones.
Impossible, you say?
Elephants weigh in between six thousand and eleven thousand pounds: their presence cannot be ignored.
They are intriguing, being the only animal on the planet with a trunk.
Their wrinkles tell us wisdom.
Life is full of color, not black and white.
But it’s also gray. Just like the wrinkly, thick folds of an elephant’s skin.
A black and white world would be so boring (no offense to Pandas, you might be one of the most adorable animals).
Even literature admits to the tenderness and striking beauty of elephants, stories about difficulty and hardship, but also about friendship and love and protecting one another. Think about Junior in The Jungle Book, and Tantor in Tarzan.
They aren’t perfect stories, easy stories, black and white stories.
But they are deep stories, where an undefined world is explored, questioning the evil, the unfair, the difficult, grasping hold of the good, of needs, of desires.
roam&wander 