Wild Rabbits and Warm Hearts

I’m reminded of the expression cold hands, warm heart. I do hope that’s true here in winterland. But maybe this necessitates my leaving the house, because now my hands are ensconced in the perma-69-degrees of central heating. Gordon believes that houseplants need to be stressed to become hardier. Perhaps this was only his logic after we had gone through a season of not watering them because life was too busy, but they always survived. I might need to get out of the house more and let the bitter cold play across my cheeks and sting my fingers.

The idea of venturing out into the cold today is not purely derivative of cold hands, warm heart. It is actually the inspiration of my dream that I can’t shake. It was so powerful and so detailed—and most of all it dovetailed so perfectly with what I wrote about in my other blog last night, that I know it was from beyond me. Before bed, I posted Maybe I need a rabbit-fur coat… in which I draw strength from the bunny I observed in our yard last night. We can both make it through the winter here, I thought. But then, I dreamed about rabbits. Two rabbits. That I rescued from a friend’s yard. I put them into cages to transport them and then brought them into my house. I let them out, but they were wild. They could not be held without scratching and they immediately began to defecate all over my white rugs. Oh, I said, I hadn’t thought through the whole pooping thing. My friend said they could be trained to go in a litter box. Ugh. This was not what I’d had in mind. I suddenly wondered why I had brought them here at all. Wild bunnies—in my house. I clearly couldn’t live with them here and they surely didn’t want to be here. At first I decided to take them to a shelter, until I realized the thing to do was just to release them. They needed to go back outside—it would solve everything.

After waking up with the initial that was odd… I began to think about the juxtaposition of my dream and my writing and found that they were connected. The rabbit does just fine out in the winter, but the inspiration I may need to draw from it is to allow it to draw me outside. To breath the cold air and allow myself to feel the chill and the wind. To feel the sadness of moving and being lonely at times. And to see the sky and the snow and the birds and the people. To enter into the streetscape that passes me by through my double-paned window. Maybe I need the cold hands to warm my heart.