Love Tiger

I close my eyes and sink into a green world. Dark and light greens, untouchable greens and the furry greens of mosses under my fingertips. Across my entertainment of leaves and grasses, of vegetable, meteor and verdant seaweed, flashes a powerful amber light – on and off, so that I conjure up a tiger.

As I receive this tiger, my heart starts to hurt instantly, my head rolls images of hunting and desiccated skins, hunger and deforestation, desparate claws and cruel traps. Decimated populations hit like bullets. Disappearing sub-species puncture the lining of my stomach.

Wait...

I want to stop this roll. I do not want to share in the extinction of the Tiger I love.

I am so weary of thinking of great tigers with despair. What I really want is to be unequivocably thrilled to my bone marrow by Tiger. What I really want is for wild tigers to recover, restore and thrive again. What I really want to do is fill each and every wild tiger still holding onto to Life with my great love for them. I want them to feel my gratitude for their against-all-odds existence in their own cells, in their precious DNA.

I want to be a light for the long future of wild tigers.

Now. I just thought that thought. I just filled wild tigers with all my love. Love Tiger.

Maybe a mother tiger just slipped away past a poacher; maybe a conservation officer just won a small battle against urgent villagers, maybe a logging company just turned away from a big, bad deal.

I love the black and amber with its white flashes rippling through the green of my mind. I am grateful. I am love. I am hope. I am Tiger.