#46 Sock Bunnies Save the World

Sock Bunnies Save the World

They’re cute little guys, softly stuffed, with round bits tied off for feet
and tail at the toe end, button eyes and nose in heel end, and two long
cut-off floppy ears.

It was a week-long morning program for ten and eleven year olds where they
were encouraged to explore widely with trash and found materials and play
games without equipment, as children in any part of the world might do. We
had lots of odd socks in the environment, and on the second day one girl
discovered that our high school staffer had learned to make sock bunnies
from her mother. They spent 45 minutes together on the floor, stuffing an
old sock with the fuzzy stuff that a cattail turns into when it gets old
(I’d brought along a couple of dozen old cattail tops picked from the edge
of a pond), then tying off legs and tail with bits of string, carefully
selecting three old shirt buttons, and learning the simple skill of sewing
them on for a face.

At our closing circle, when everybody shared what they had made, she proudly
introduced her sock bunny to the group. The next day there was a cluster of
girls around Megan and the bunnies multiplied. By the following day they
had leapt the gender gap. One little boy who had been able to do nothing
but talk of Game Boy for days was now the proud papa of his own little
bunny. The girls had gone on to use rags and bits of wood to make bunny
beds, bunny clothes, bunny houses and bunny babies. The supply of cattail
fuzz had been decimated and every sock with a good heel was gone. Yet as we
were getting ready to close up for the week, we had to deal with the urgent
request from another boy to scrounge enough materials and find enough time
to make one last bunny.

They were so eager, so proud of what they could create with their own hands,
so tender with their babies, so ready to love. How could so much come from
so little? These were the simplest of cast-off materials. What if every
child in the world had access to an old sock, some loving attention, and the
lore of our mothers? It doesn’t seem like too much to ask. What if every
child could make a bunny? (And what if they all had access to a tree to
climb as well, but that’s another story, as is the soccer ball made from an
old rag covered with rubber bands…)

I think of all the children of the world. There are those who are powerless
in the face of destitution—-who have nothing, and see nothing to hope for.
There are those who are becoming ever more powerless and passive in the face
of affluence, who are force fed entertainment and information, and denied
the opportunity to be actors and creators in their own lives. They are all
craving more, some because they don’t get enough and others because their
diet is so rich in addictive junk that nothing can satisfy for long.

I think about power. If you can’t be powerful within yourself, then you’re
vulnerable to promises of power without, and this tends to be the power that
dominates and destroys.

As these children I was with created more and more sock bunnies, fully of
love and joy and simple pride in creation, I caught a vision of the bunnies
multiplying, as bunnies do, and maybe, just maybe, saving the world.


Pamela Haines
Philadelphia 7/06


Some things that have given me hope recently:

The Network of Spiritual Progressives, started by Rabbi Michael Lerner as an
alternative to the Religious Right;

All the people in the US who have become passionate about the plight of the
children of Northern Uganda;

Consumer demand beginning to drive the sale of recycled-content office
furnishings--just as it drove the growth of recycling;

A report from a Bolivian grandfather about the spirit of hope that is abroad
in his land in their new indigenous president Evo Morales.