Put The Bunny Back In The Box

The other day I found myself thinking, truly and deeply, about a scene in Con Air. Cameron Poe (Nicolas Cage) is finally being released after serving eight years in prison. 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 body and says:

"Why couldn't you put the bunny back in the box?"

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.

Hanging out with my grandsons the other night, I thought about the reason we give stuffed animals or baby blankets to kids. 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 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 called 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.

We are the only ones who can feel that instinct and then decide to recreate it—to design beauty, to grow gardens, to 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.

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.

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 if they can’t do it alone.

The Art of 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.