1-28-2024 8:22pm

The White Rabbit's Message Versus Punxsutawney Phil

Beth Callahan Editor

Springboro's Guy Pasvogel, published author, shares his thoughts

My, how time flies! Christmas seems like an eternity ago. In one short month, we have transitioned from Christmas lights on our outdoor foliage and house to icicles on the rooftop and Arctic chill in the air. January is almost over, and in just a few days, we will be celebrating Groundhog Day — the next highlighted day on my Monster Grid wall calendar.

Isn’t it amazing how one rodent can steal the show for one day out of the year and another, such as the white rabbit, can linger in obscurity with no holiday or fanfare? I, for one, think it is time to “dig down the rabbit hole," so to speak and give the white rabbit its due.

Who can forget the famous children’s novel, “Alice in Wonderland,” written in 1863 by English author Lewis Carroll? In it, Alice is sitting by a tree in springtime when she sees a white rabbit dressed in a topcoat, who is looking at his pocket watch and lamenting that he is late.

Curiously… Alice follows the white rabbit and falls into a rabbit hole.

What follows is an adventure that includes meeting fantasy creatures that encourage her to eat and drink to get bigger or smaller. She meets the Queen of Hearts, the Cheshire Cat, the Mad Hatter, a doormouse, a caterpillar with magic mushrooms and the mock turtle.

Alice is awakened by her sister and realizes that it has all been a bad dream.

Then in 1965, Grace Slick, of the psychedelic group Jefferson Airplane, penned a song titled “White Rabbit,” which refers to the "Alice in Wonderland" story. If your unfamiliar with the lyrics, they go like this:

Grace Slick reportedly wrote the song “White Rabbit” after an acid trip.

The term “White Rabbit” is about following your curiosity. Back then, drugs were a part of expanding one’s mind and self experimentation. I doubt if Lewis Carroll was on drugs when he wrote "Alice in Wonderland," but he must have had a wild imagination!

White rabbit also appears in the 1999 movie, "The Matrix” starring Keanu Reeves, in which the lead character Neo is told to “look for the white rabbit.” It appears on the tattoo of a sleazy nightclub patron.

Reeves follows the girl with the white rabbit tattoo “down the rabbit hole,” so to speak, to find Morpheus and the red pill, which represents truth, versus the blue pill, which represents returning to normalcy and complacency.

These are just three examples of how the “white rabbit” has evolved through the years to signify “digging down the rabbit hole” to find truth rather than burying one’s head in the sand as if the truth never existed.

One of my favorite quotes comes from author Wayne Dyer and it goes like this… "The highest form of ignorance is when you reject something you don’t know anything about.”

Nowadays, it has been so easy for mainstream media to label movements or ideas as “conspiracy theory” rather than to “dig down the rabbit hole to find what has later found out to be true facts. Like Grace Slick says, “feed your head, feed your head” ...and not bury it in sand.

To me, February 2nd and the Punxsutawney Phil prognosis of an early spring has been relegated to a trivial afterthought. Thank you White Rabbit for enlightening me to dig down the rabbit hole to find knowledge and understanding. From there, I will formulate my OWN truths, as I see it.