Fellow earthlings, I hope your day has been blessed with the fruits of your labor! I feel inclined to share a gruesomely sad incident that I witnessed earlier this week. Full disclosure, the rest of this blog will have gory details.

Earlier in the week, I visited a new religious art exhibition on display at the Springville Art Museum. The exhibition was filled a myriad of human expressions. If you wish to be graced with the colorful expression of  the human being’s consciousness than I highly recommend visiting this museum.

I was driving back home after it had already become dark. I turned on to the long and winding road which leads to my home below the Wasatch Mountains. Traffic was light and we were cruising about 40′ through a rural area of town.
Suddenly the commuter in front of me almost swerved off the road and since I wasn’t that far behind him, I barely had time to swerve out of the way of a creature laying in the middle of the single lane. The driver in front of me had hit a full grown raccoon and kept on driving. Where I live, its common to see all kinds of rodents and creatures scurrying across the roads.

I pull over to inspect the situation and what I witnessed next is still burned to the back of my eyelids! My truck is pulled over with the the hazards’ on and as I’m walking towards the raccoon, I realize its a house cat which was running across the road at the most unfortunate time. This ashy gray colored cat was sprawled out in the middle of the road with his skill halfway bashed in. His jaws had been broken so that the mouth was open a full 180 degrees. One of his eyes were hanging to the side of his face and I saw the deep cavity of his eye socket. I stood over the cat in astonishment as crimson colored blood was beginning to pool onto the asphalt and run toward my feet.

What broke my heart and brought me to tears was that the cat was still trying to move his legs and roll over. In all my life I had never witnessed a sentient being in such suffering until that moment. Language fail to describe the feeling of compassion and pity I felt toward this cat. I knew this cat was dying and that there was nothing that I could do. That feeling of helplessness as I watched this cat roll around in his last seconds of life is still haunting me. It stopped moving and died about 30 seconds later.

There was a box and some old clothing in the back of my truck which I used to put the cat in. I left him in that box off to the side of the road and wished its sentient soul to rest in awareness.

I wish to express my belief that all the creatures of life are of perfectly equal importance to the cosmos. All the living creature wish for life and well being.

I felt the urge to apologize for sharing such a dismal story but I don’t really feel that sorry. Death is a part of life and while I was broken to witness the suffering of this cat’s death, I also saw its liberation from life to the stream of awareness that is core to all sentient being.

Bosom friends, live every moment in the present, for you never know when your time is up. Peace and Love!

Erik Hight