Tom lives in our neighborhood. He is big and bold and he’s always carousing around for ladies. He’s a handsome, confident guy. Tom spends most of his time hanging out on the corner of a major intersection in the neighborhood. Tom has become sort of a mascot or maybe a unifying symbol of our neck of the woods, and we all love him. Tom is a big old wild turkey.
The other day on our Nextdoor social media app, one neighbor posted an angry rant about the people who are supposedly feeding Tom. This was followed by righteous posts about the dangers of feeding wildlife, and then other posts about how frustrating it is when Tom is strutting his stuff and causing traffic jams, and then other posts about how neighbors need to stop being so mean and cynical, to stop driving so fast, and just enjoy the fact that we live in the midst of so much natural wonder, which was followed up by further posts from other people, who live outside of our neighborhood, admonishing everyone to just “chill out”, which sparked angry posts from inside of the neighborhood, asking those posters why they even felt they had any right to talk about Tom, because they probably had never even seen him! All of these paragraphs and paragraphs of posts continue on and on, with the usual likes and dislikes, and hearts, and happy face emoticons and angry faced emoticons. I believe that even at this moment, “the infamous Tom thread” on Nextdoor, is still quite healthy and active.
Do you know what a group of turkeys is called? It’s called a rafter. Watching the antics of the excitable “Tom thread” on our local social media, makes me realize that we have quite a rafter here, in our neighborhood. Turkeys abound. But my one and only favorite wild turkey is Tom. He doesn’t read Nextdoor. He just hangs out at the corner, doing his thing.
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.