Confessions of an Aoudad
My human neighbors think of me as a beast. Funny thing is, I think of them as colleagues. Not that we get along that well, but that they, like we, are pilgrims in the journey of life, seeking to live with satisfaction relative to the situation at hand. Consider one of my neighbors, Nita Gilger. I can understand that she thinks of me and my fellow aoudads as nuisances. There are, after all, about 25 thousand of us in Texas, and we are, as they say, "non-native species." But we are native to ourselves, and we do what we were created to do. I can’t help it that I’m hungry all the time. I was born that way. Nita responds in a good way, by remembering that her task isn’t to shoot me, but to accept the nuisances in life, and indeed the great difficulties, by openness to a non-controlling light within. She speaks of living from an inner light whom she calls God. I am glad to be her teacher in this way. Perhaps I, too, am a vessel of the inner light, in my aoudad sort of way. Perhaps my desire to live with satisfaction is my way of responding to the light. In any case, those air horns really don't bother me. I, too, with God's help, have learned to deal with nuisances. We aoudads and our human neighbors are, as it were, co-nuisances. Was this God's plan? I don't know. What I know is that we can live together, even as we are nuisances to one another, if we are flexible. As Nita says, there's no set recipe.