Lessons from the Weasel

Calling someone a Weasel is generally considered an insult. However, after reading an article written by Annie Dillard in 1982, I have decided to claim the weasel as the animal I would most like to be like as I walk this difficult path. Consider the following and see if perhaps you don't find yourself admiring this little 'Mustelid':

[The Weasel] "stalks rabbits, mice, muskrats, and birds, killing more bodies than he can eat warm, and often dragging the carcasses home. Obedient to instinct, he bites his prey at the neck either splitting the jugular vein at the throat or crunching the brain at the base of the skull, and he does not let go. One naturalist refused to kill a weasel who was socketed into his hand deeply as a rattlesnake. The man could in no way pry the tiny weasel off, and he had to walk half a mile to water, the weasel dangling from his palm, and soak him off like a stubborn label. And once, says Ernest Thompson Seton--once, a man shot an eagle out of the sky. He examined the eagle and found the dry skull of a weasel fixed by the jaws to his throat. The supposition is that the eagle had pounced on the weasel and the weasel swiveled and bit as instinct taught him, tooth to neck, and nearly won. I would like to have seen that eagle from the air a few weeks or months before he was shot: was the whole weasel still attached to his feathered throat, a fur pendant?"

I have asked God today to make me like the weasel: tenacious, never quitting, holding on with a fierce will and determination! I have had set before me a vision from God that I am not to quit, and so I am sinking my teeth in deep and no matter where I am taken, be it to the depths of despair, or dangled precariously over the most jagged peaks, I will hold on until I hear my creator tell me to let go.

Annie Dillard ends her story with this final thought:

"I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you... Seize it and let it seize you up aloft even, till your eyes burn out and drop; let your musky flesh fall off in shreds, and let your very bones unhinge and scatter, loosened over fields, over fields and woods, lightly, thoughtless, from any height at all, from as high as eagles."

This is my message to the father of lies, this is my cry to God, this is my promise to my husband, this is my call. I will not relinquish what I believe to be true no matter how much easier it would be to just... let... go...