Grade 9, Eastwood Collegiate Institute
The rabbit is a metaphor for the human experience in that she sits quietly by a still lake observing the towering canyons and passing clouds because her life has been forced to still. Prior to this period of reflection, her life consisted of constant movement and chaos. Now the rabbit is forced by life circumstances to stop her survival pursuits and perhaps find greater meaning in the silence of skies vacant of the contrails of airplanes, the roads absent of the drone of cars. Perhaps the ever-encroaching cities will cease their habitat degradation, pollution will recede and the rabbits will have less tumult and more tranquility ahead of them.
The rabbit's life slowing is a reference to how COVID has forced us as human beings to slow down, live with long stretches of silence and spend time reflecting on our existence due to our once crazy world now being in what feels like an endless lockdown, forced to separate ourselves from the people and places we once held so dear, and now being left to a silence that provokes the mind and heart in ways one may have never predicted.