Umbrellas and Cows

There’s a Handsome Family song that I love: “Everything that Rises Must Converge”.

The title is also a Flannery O’Connor story (and the name of a collection of stories), which I read recently and also loved.

This title was borrowed originally from another writer, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. This from Wikipedia “The title Everything That Rises Must Converge refers to a work by the French philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin titled the “Omega Point : Remain true to yourself, but move ever upward toward greater consciousness and greater love! At the summit you will find yourselves united with all those who, from every direction, have made the same ascent. For everything that rises must converge.“

The Handsome Family song goes “Some people are like umbrellas; they pass through your life with little meaning and then there’s the ones who make you hang on to every word.”

“Greater consciousness and greater love” are ambitious ideas. I like the simpler interpretation by the Handsome Family. Some people make you hang on the every word. Some things are not banal. Some experiences are unique, and not just in the sense that they are unique because they are happening to you. They really are.

And Foro says, some cows (and horses, and pigs, and stuffed animals) are unique. They are different. They deserve more.

My goal now is to find one of those cows in the real world. There is an association here vivalavacca.ch, but no one seems to be in charge and my emails and calls go unanswered. So I slid over to prospecierara.ch and Foro and I will hopefully become godparents to a cow. The Hinterwald cow resembles Foro the most, so that’s what we’ll go with.

Foro is happy with our decision. After his experiences in Corsica, where cows are allowed to roam free, it just seems so painful to see them condemned to always having their calves taken away from them, and to finish in a meat packing plant no matter how many liters of milk they produced over the years.

So we’ve sent our request to sponsor a cow. We’ll see if we can find a real world Foro, because not all cows are like umbrellas.