PUT THE BUNNY BACK IN THE BOX

Knowing is not the same thing as what I know.

Knowing is what I am attracted to and follow, and what later confirms the reason I did before being certain of what I knew. What I know is what I think I’m certain of. I am here to share my knowing.

With this in mind, welcome to this Rabbit Trail.

The other day I found myself thinking, truly and deeply, about a scene in Con Air. Cameron Poe, played by Nicolas Cage, is finally being released after serving eight years in prison. In the middle of a maximum-security prison break, serial killers, explosions, and hijacked airplanes, Poe's deepest concern in that moment is a stuffed bunny for his daughter.

The entire movie is driven by one simple desire: he wants to get home, meet the daughter he's never met, and give her a small stuffed bunny he bought for her birthday. The bunny travels with him through the entire film as a symbol of home, innocence, and belonging.

That plan unravels when the plane is hijacked by the convicts and the killer Billy Bedlam discovers Poe's secret: he is being released, not relocated to another facility. As he begins rifling through Poe's belongings in the cargo hold, he finds the bunny and the letters Poe has written to his daughter.

Poe appears behind him and delivers the line that became one of the most memorable in the film:

“Put the bunny back in the box.”

A fight follows. Poe kills Bedlam, then stands over his dead body and says, “Why couldn't you put the bunny back in the box?”

Hanging out with my grandsons the other night, I thought why do we give stuffed animals to kids in the first place. Why do we allow them to personify things with no soul, or feed them cartoons with characters that never die? Why do we teach them that everything and everyone deserves to be loved, safe, and happy?

Somewhere inside, beyond our biology, there is a drive to want them to know it is possible to love and cohabitate with everything in this world, even the toys we create.

We want children to believe the world is a wonderful place.

We sell this bag of goods to kids who expect to grow up, belong, and become part of a world where curious and happy adults are capable of knowing better and doing better as a result—together.

Because we, deep down inside, know better.

A baby doesn't want to be unhappy, anxious, or worried they will die alone. They don't want to ruminate. There is nothing in them that wants to stay in that suffering or cling to it as a badge of resilience.

When a baby is distressed, we flip them, rock them, feed them, distract them, and most of the time they move on. When they don't, we call an ambulance.

Why don't we do this with adults?

We are disconnected from who we are and what we already know. People believing that our humanity runs on cruelty, indifference, or “everyone for themselves” is unrooted in who we are biologically.

Abundance in nature is not scarce.

Nothing in nature says, “This beauty is only mine.”

A children's book I read to my grandsons the other night about flowers, The Flower Thief, makes this obvious: someone tries to hoard a single beautiful flower, afraid someone else will take it, until they see how many creatures it feeds and how many flowers it becomes.

Plants, pollinators, seasons—they just keep sharing.

Then I pulled out my phone and showed them my own flower photos, with so many bees on them, some even taking naps.

A bee doesn't stand back and say, “What a miracle.” It just knows enough to be drawn in by the flower, like I am.

And there went the Rabbit Trail.

A bee is drawn to a flower. I am drawn to the flower. But I can also take a picture of it, show it to my grandsons, plant another one, paint it, write about it, or build a garden around it.

We are the only ones who can feel that instinct and then decide to recreate it—to design beauty, grow gardens, and build homes and communities that carry that same sense of welcome forward.

We are the mind-readers of this world. We are the consciousness of this planet.

Which took me somewhere else.

You can feel alone, but you are not. You live inside an enormous network—people, animals, places, communities that could hold you if you let them. It only takes one other person to make “alone” not true anymore.

When I moved to this country, I came with one other person.

That was it.

From there, I built a life of thousands—not thousands of people who belong to me, but thousands of connections that proved I was not alone. Then I birthed ideas and dreams of my own.

Inside those thousands are eight billion more, plus all the animals you can love and all the small things you can carry when you're scared: a bunny, a stuffed toy, a favorite blanket, a corner of sky.

There are communities that would welcome you in a heartbeat if you knew yourself enough to say, “Not this, that,” and gave yourself permission to change your mind when it isn't right.

That's part of the work.

Try, learn, pivot. That's what we're here for.

This is where my dharma bell rang for me.

A through-line I could birth where every color I sell, every conversation I have, every painting and essay is about reconnecting people to their biological birthright to belong, become and bear the fruit of their knowing.

Starting with knowing.

I want every conversation to bend back toward this: we are here to belong, become, and birth what we dream of, and then help others birth what they dream of because we can't do it alone.

This knowing is grounded in biology and in the word root—rooting for yourself, rooting for others, rooting for the world, and rooting for future generations with what you birth and build.

We have a world that roots us to life with a feeling of belonging, a care circuit that roots us to each other with a set of needs, and a fecundity or potential that wants us to root for the world by making us greater than the sum of these parts, birthing ideas and dreams.

We are wired for it. We are made of it. All we have to do is choose to believe it.

And somehow, after flowers, bees, babies, grandsons, belonging, biology, and eight billion people, I ended up right back where I started.

The meaning of a stuffed bunny, and of putting it back in the box, came down to this: our desire to protect the love we carry through all hell breaking loose is what we are born to do.

Put the bunny back in the box.

This is my way of sharing my knowing with you.

When we know together we do better.

Gretchen.  Send this to someone you know.  Author Note

I came to this work not through therapy or a doctorate, but through a bucket of paint. I didn’t hear a calling, and I wasn’t particularly gifted at art. Color became my vehicle for self-actualization not because I loved decorating, but because using paint colors to make myself feel at home changed how I felt about the world.

See my color work at colorbaggage.com