"And suddenly the bull looked at me. With the innocence of all animals in his eyes, but also with a supplication. It was a complaint against the inexplicable injustice, an appeal against the unnecessary cruelty."

This photo and a version* of this quote have been doing the rounds of Facebook. The story touched me, and I wanted to use it as a starting point for this post, so I checked it out. I think what is going around on Facebook is a conflation of the event associated with the picture and the worlds of Alvaro Munera, whose journey from bullfighter to animal rights activist is a great story in itself.

I believe that this kind of connection between one being and another, across the boundaries of species, is possible. I have had my own conversations with cats, trees, and insects. This particular communication between man and bull may well have happened, even if it didn't happen to the man whose name has become attached to it. Anyway, who am I to let the truth get in the way of a good story?

Seriously, though, I am convinced that this kind of connection is our only hope if we are to meet the challenges that face everyone on our planet. As humans, as the only species on the planet with the kind of self-awareness that gives us a sense of separation from all that surrounds us, we need to cultivate moments of connection with other beings. For the sake of the wholeness of our souls and that of our planet home, we need to learn how to live lives of connection.

Surely, the only way you can destroy whole tracts of forest for wood, or worse, tar sands, is if you have made no personal connection to forests or trees or the creatures who live there. The only way you can condone 'collateral damage' in war is if you haven't looked into the eyes of the people you are bombing. In order to do an injustice to another being, you need to be disconnected, at a distance from it. You have to believe that you are somehow different, if not superior. The instant you break through that disconnection and see another being as an equal, it becomes impossible to harm it, as that bullfighter found out.

This is the magic of connection: the moment you look at another person, human or otherwise, and see another Self looking back at you. Seeking out these moments of communication with the natural world soothes our souls, lightens our days, and increases our capacity for compassion. It is my mission in life to offer people these experiences of connection. And it is my dream that, one day, our species will learn to make connections with all that lives around us, will stop destroying the natural world upon which we and other species depend for survival, and will begin to act from compassion for all that is.

The challenge is huge, and time seems short. But this work and this dreaming is what I can do. Making the magic of connection.

*The provenance of the photo and the quote are in doubt, but I did some digging and found a blog post with the original quote in Spanish and an imperfect translation into English. The above is me making sense of that translation.