A Year of Gratitude – March 10, 2024
Gratitude was hiding in plain sight today, in the sunshine streaming in the window onto my table in the studio. It was wrapped up in a cute little bunny nestled inside an Easter basket while I was taking photos. I couldn’t help but smile when looking at them.
This little bunny came home with me from a local thrift shop last year. It’s a Peter Rabbit bunny right down to the little blue coat he wears. I saw him on a shelf. I picked him up and realized that he was missing one eye. Because he was missing an eye, his price had been discounted. His tag read “damaged” but he still looked very cute to me.
He was just the right size for tucking into Easter baskets to take photos, so I brought him home. Emma and I scrubbed him clean with a bit of mild soap. We rubbed his soft fur until it was mostly dry and then left him to air dry. I had safety eyes from a project we had worked on, so we chose the ones that matched his other eye and decided to wait until he was dry before adding it.
Once he dried, I found myself not wanting to add a new eye. I started to think about that great passage in The Velveteen Rabbit that I have always loved.
“Real isn’t how you are made, it’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.
It doesn’t happen all at once. You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”
Perhaps this little rabbit was missing that eye because he had been loved so much by a child. To me, that wasn’t damage at all. It was just the age that comes from being loved, from giving of yourself for years. I can respect that age because I wear it myself. I have been lucky enough to be loved by people who do understand me and see me as Real. I’ve been lucky enough to love people in the same way.
No, I wasn’t going to do anything to this little bunny because it was perfect just the way it was. I will smile at the sight of it and be reminded that we all become more real every day and that we wear the signs of it. That’s okay because we’ve earned those signs by loving people who, if we are very lucky, love us right back.
This post is part of our A Year of Gratitude Series. You can find the introduction, inspiration, and entire year’s gratitude’s posts here.