“Revolution, Anyone? (To End Suffering)”

Written by Shelly Moore ©️ 2025

This morning, I sat beside a dying baby bunny in my garden.

I didn’t plan on it.

I had work to do.

I was building a recording studio in my little backyard playhouse.

But then I saw something move in the flowerbed—something struggling. Something small.

When I looked closer, I saw him.

Eyes swollen and pooled with blood.

Leg twisted, broken and useless.

Breathing shallow and hard.

Still alive, but just barely.

And suddenly, nothing else mattered.

I dropped everything (literally) and sat down in the dirt.

Right there beside him.

And I stayed.. and cried. Bc of course I did.

I made calls—dozens of them.

Animal control. Wildlife rehabbers. Emergency clinics.

I wasn’t just crying—I was trying.

I would’ve driven an hour. Two hours.

Because it wasn’t just sadness—it was sacred responsibility.

This little life, this baby I didn’t even know existed the day before,

was now suffering in my flowerbed.

And I couldn’t unsee it.

I couldn’t just walk away and pretend it didn’t matter just because it was small. Bc it was, “just nature.”

Eventually, someone came.

She knelt with me with compassion in her eyes and heart.

She lifted the baby gently, examined his leg, and said he’d likely been suffering from the moment he was born.

Much smaller than his siblings (who had healthy, plump little round bellies and perfect little baby bunny ears). He was severely undeveloped. A weak nest, she said. He had likely only known suffering.

A life stacked against him from the start, unfairly.

“Nature is brutal,” we say aloud to push away the feelings of empathy which threaten to show weakness. (Or so they say.)

The animal control officer promised to try to help rehab him.

Or, if not, to help him go gently.

And as I watched her walk away with him cupped in her gloved hands,

I sat back down in the dirt and sobbed like something in me had just split.

Because it had.

Something inside me shattered this morning.

Not because I didn’t know suffering existed—

but because I absof*ckinglutely do.

Because I always do.

Because I can’t not feel it.

Because I’ve cried over pet mice and roadkill and the dying eyes of animals most people don’t even blink at.

Because I’ve always felt this strange ache in my chest that says:

“This isn’t how it’s supposed to be.”

We’re told that suffering is part of life.

That pain is the price of growth.

That death and decay and grief are the tuition for becoming wise.

And maybe there’s some truth to that.

But I’m not sure I subscribe to that theology anymore.

At least not in the way it’s always been sold to us.

What if that’s a story written by people too wounded to imagine something better?

(“Here I am expecting just a little bit too much from the wounded,” as MJK sings in A Perfect Circle’s, “3 Libras.”)

What if we don’t have to learn everything the “hard way?”

What if we could evolve through empathy instead of agony?

What if tenderness was enough?

So here I am. Sitting in the f*cking garden.

Grief still in my body.

Eye spigots only just slowing to a trickle.

And I want to ask you something—quietly, but boldly:

Who wants to start a revolution with me?

A revolution to end suffering.

Or at least to stop pretending it’s the only way we learn.

A revolution that says we’ve had enough of needless pain.

That love can teach, too.

That gentleness is a valid curriculum.

That maybe the whole point of evolution… is to eventually not have to suffer at all.

I know it sounds radical.

I know it sounds naive AF.

But I believe it with every cracked-open part of my soul:

We don’t have to keep doing it this way.

If you’ve ever cried over something small…

If you’ve ever felt shattered by the pain of something that “didn’t matter” to most…

If you’ve ever wished the world could soften just a little…

Then maybe you’re part of this revolution too.

Maybe it’s already started.

Right here,

in the dirt,

beside an innocent baby bunny,

on a planet that’s just waiting to remember how to be kind again.

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