“But here’s the thing,” she continues. “Hurting something is easy. Anyone can close their fist. The hard part—the rebellious part—is keeping it open.”
Freya Parker, a 34-year-old wildlife rehabilitator living on the outskirts of Portland, has spent her entire adult life proving that gentleness is not a weakness. It is a quiet, immovable force. If you were to take the idiom literally, she is its poster child: she has been known to spend twenty minutes coaxing a confused bumblebee out of a sunroom window rather than swatting it. She names the spiders in her shed (George, Helena, and Little Ted) and refuses to use glue traps for mice, preferring humane catch-and-release boxes she builds herself from recycled cardboard. wouldnt hurt a fly freya parker
She has been mocked on social media—a video of her rescuing a fly from a puddle of dishwater went viral for all the wrong reasons. Commenters called her “insufferably gentle” and asked, “Does she think flies have souls?” “But here’s the thing,” she continues
“We get calls all the time,” says Marcus, her lone volunteer. “People have a fly in the house, they want to kill it. Freya will drive twenty miles to net it and release it outside. They think she’s crazy.” He grins. “She’s not crazy. She’s just the only person I know who actually means the phrase.” The hard part—the rebellious part—is keeping it open
Her response was characteristically unbothered. “I don’t know about souls,” she said in a follow-up post. “But I know about suffering. And I know I don’t want to be the cause of it when I can just as easily be the cure.”