Philosopher Bonnie's Big Book of Questions

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I look up and see there is a doe grazing right outside my kitchen window. She sees me through the screen, and I wonder now how well she could see me, but the question in my head at the time was, “How can I most effectively tell a deer that I am no threat to her?”

If I puff myself up and make myself bigger and louder, I can tell her she is not safe — but if I want to make her feel at ease? I want her to go back to grazing and enjoy herself like she was before the sound of the water startled her…how can I explain I am just doing dishes and am more shepherd than wolf or leaf blower?

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Are spiders water-snobs like cats and horses? They generally drink dew from their webs and leaves. That must be lovely water in balanced nature, but what about in my living room? There are flying creatures occasionally in the house and they annoy me, so I root for the spiders. And I wonder, it’s a pretty long walk to the kitchen and the water here has fluoride and chemicals in it supposedly tested for human safety — surely not for spiders, though — or cats or dogs for that matter. But if I want to take good care of random house spiders, how might I best go about it? I left some spring water on a spoon on the glass top table near the most active web — figuring it would give somewhere somewhat secure to stand whilst drinking so it wouldn’t drown…but we humans have not designed thoughtful water containers for house spiders. I suppose a bottle cap could work, though...

Is there a market for water dishes for spiders?

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How does a quantum physicist explain a heart transplant? There is nothing solid here.

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If (as some believe) a g-d exists that's separate and distinct from me, one that's paying attention to what I do and has some preference on how I do things — what do they (using a gender neutral pronoun, not knowing what this hypothetical g-d might use) want me to do with creatures I find in my bathtub? Does it make a difference if it's night, or day? Or stormy weather? How can I know what the right thing to do is, without "playing g-d" myself?

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How can I be benevolent and benign to other creatures, when I don't understand the world from their perspectives? If we are all connected, then is there really an “other”? Why is the illusion so strong?

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The 3-4 pounds of microbes that live in me and on me, how do they perceive me? Am I g-d to them? If so, if I were interested in being benign and benevolent to them, a kind and attentive g-d...what would that look like? With all their differences, could I please all of them all of the time? How would I choose when there's a conflict of interest?

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Or is it more like I am the local universe for all these microbes? When I am sitting next to another human with their dog on a park bench, are we 3 universes hanging out? What does this mean for our understanding of our own "local universe”?

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Are my thoughts a podcast for all the microbes that live in me and on me? Are they listening to me think while they work to digest my food and stuff?

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Why don’t we have anti-inflammatory centers where people can go and get the inflammation out of their systems? Spend a few weeks eating foods the body can build a healthy body out of with no inflammatory side effects, in the optimal environment. Actual health care centers, where we care for health by giving everyone best circumstances for actual health — why don't we send people there who are feeling weak, depleted, depressed, or full of dis-ease?

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What would deer do with their free time if they had opposable thumbs?

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Listening to chickens laying eggs, I wonder, what is their experience of being alive?

Me, being a non-chicken primarily concerned and interested in non-chicken things, I can't really know what it's like to be a chicken as a chicken. I can squinch myself down to have my eyes at the height of a chicken, poke around in the grass and mimic the moves of a chicken the best my anatomy (and disability) will allow, but I'll be experiencing my experience of mimicking a chicken — NOT experiencing being the chicken itself. This is clearest to me when I get up from this thought-practice and do something else because even thinking about mimicking a chicken becomes uninteresting rather quickly — and I realize the chicken doesn't get that option.

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Why do we choose as a society to have some artists make a living wage while others don’t? We revere Emily Dickinson, and many people have made a lot of money off the fact that she wrote poetry — but how much did she make off of it?

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If you were moved to think about things differently after reading this and want to read more such things, let me know in the comments! Tips are super duper cool, too.

*Kitten Cuddle Yoga is a book(let) I wrote on my old banana yellow iPhone 5c while traveling in 2017. It starts off at a weed farm in the middle of nowhere Oregon, takes us to Crater Lake, and ends up in Taos, NM. It has about as much to do with yoga as Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintance has to do with Zen or motorcycles, but it's cute and filled with kitten photos. It is out of print but still exists as a pdf, so if you'd like a copy just tip $5 or more and send an email to [email protected], and I'll reply with the link to download it.