Everyone knows I can rarely let something be [fill in the blank- usually 'funny']... I must take it apart and understand WHY. (Also no one is surprised to learn that I was one of those kids you'd have been ill-advised to leave alone in a room with anything you didn't want disassembled.)

OK, so today while slogging through ankle-deep slush on and beside the sidewalks of midtown, I thought of this video that was flying around the internet awhile back (reminder to self: watch on mute):


and I remember even the most steel-hearted people I knew tearing up (at minimum). Why?

Because it's so touching. Why?

Because despite everything - the long absence, his youth at the time of the friendship, his wildness - the lion did something the humans had barely dared hope for. He remembered them from before, how much he'd loved them, and welcomed them. More than that - he ran to them and swept them up. A creature of such power that he could crush them with a pawswipe, choosing to restrain it enough so he could express love, joy and tenderness instead in a way that they could survive through. At some core-of-our-soul, sub-cellular, sub-molecular, cosmic, eternal way, we know we're meant for that, even if we don't.  Groaning for it, you might even say.  So seeing something that adumbrates it, awakens an unbearable longing for an ineffable sweetness of the existence of which we are sure despite never quite having experienced it. Now and not yet. CS Lewis would have loved it.