Dispatch Number 66 -Pig

Observation and processing of an experience is something done best alone, there are no voices to shatter it. On a morning desert walk along a sand road that cut through a forest of scaly wrathlike trees I saw a dirty white pig foraging for food, small enough to still be suckling a tit.

On the way back I saw the same piglet crushed dead in the roadway; a pickup must have run it over by accident. I had seen it foraging for food only an hour before. A life ended with intestines squeezed out and mouth still moist filling with flies. Damp sand stuck to its mouth, tongue and saw-like teeth.

I stood over the runt, felt little emotion, no pity or sentimentality. Alone I experienced this. When walking alone one doesn't have to listen or offer hollow sentimentality or drum up pity about a dead pig and how we should do something like bury it or chase the flies away. It was dead. Nature or the community would take care of it; deserts are extremely efficient in these ways. I stood over it. I continued my walk back to the village where people and water were.

The next morning I drove the same road I walked. The pig was gone.
The peacefulness of aloneness and no voices to shatter it.

David
Otavalo, Ecuador