A world full of stories: Emma the groundhog

 

I always believed that looking up above and far in the distance would help me better know the world around me and live in harmony in its diversity. I can say with certainty, after consulting the illustrated encyclopedia of animals, that, for long enough, I shared this belief with groundhogs. Native of the alps and used to live in rocky and impervious environments at altitudes of 1700 until up to 3000 m, groundhogs have developed  into communities of incredibly powerful listeners and surprisingly precise observers. Within those communities, certain individuals distinguished themselves more than others based on their heroic deeds, on the distance their call could reach and the degrees their eyes could cover. Emma, a groundhog of the Cold Valley, was gifted, on top of with innate talent for sight and hearing, with the capacity to overcome the limitations of eyes and ears by coordination of her body and lightness of her paws. She was able to run incredibly fast to help other animals escape, always winning the survival race against danger. Everybody in the Park of the Adamello liked to recall her brave actions and always commented with:"..and yet, she is so humble". The ode for Emma usually started on that perfect sunny day of October, just right before the hibernation season, when Emma screamed an acute and long evacuation alarm that saved the groundhogs from a landslide, unpredictable and deadly. It was still her who saved the newly born groundhogs babies from a falcon looking for a tasty Sunday brunch. Through the morning fog that made trees resemble humans and rocks resemble monsters, Emma was the only one able to distinguish, 1 km afar, nature conscious hikers from those who disrespectfully threw their trash on the ground. Emma's big heart and readiness made her the perfect sentinel and it seemed like she had nothing more to improve, until life gave her exactly the lesson she needed. 

One day, so focused on the spatial and temporal distance that precedes the future instant, she did not see a big fracture between two rocks and fell into it. The fall surprised her so much! For the first time, her amazing sight, ears and fast moving paws failed her as she had not been able to sense the danger. She was trying to understand what had happened with a dizzy feeling of abandonment, when someone touched her on the back: it was a groundhog lending its paw to help her out of the hole.                            Once outside, she recognized his savior to be one very quite member of the groundhog community, who never talked in meetings and disliked looking at others in the eyes out of shyness. You can thus imagine her yet growing surprise when, collected all the bit of courage he could find, the groundhog told her :" I have heard you are very good at watching and listening in the distance in all existing dimensions, but you should not forget to look just right around you, because that is where sometimes the most beautiful and the most dangerous things can be found". Clearly embarrassed by his own courage and instantly regretting to have not hold his tongue, the groundhog turned his back very fast and ran away, in a behavior that might have been perceived as impolite, had Emma not been in shock for what she had just heard. It took her some hours to get back up from the fall and some days to get back up from the advice she had received, but finally she was able to adsorb it, like a disgusting yet healing medicine. Emma trained herself to reduce her field of view, she learnt to spend more time contemplating the absence of spatial and temporal distance that characterizes the present, she spent more time enjoying the lovely wild flowers around her and the slow moving beetles and more time walking slowly rather than running fast. As she changed her habits, her acute scream became a lovely harmonious voice, which often said 'there is a way to know the world which comes from looking close, so very close'.