‘When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief.”
From The Peace of Wild Things
Wendell Berry
As I mentioned in an earlier blog I was trying to emulate
“ the peace of wild things” no luck yet instead I
have found increasing levels of pessimism and
cynicism pervading my own thoughts and my
conversations with others. This somewhat
discouraging trend is I think in part fueled
by the constant bombardment we face it seems
things are only getting worse whether it is
violence against women, the gap between rich
and poor, the hope initially raised by movements like
the Arab Spring now descending into familiar
patterns of corruption and intimidation,
the collapse of economies worldwide,
the greed and duplicity of politian’s and in
Canada we can add our inability to resolve
our long standing issues with our
First Nations and the all-out assault on the
environment by our government and their
industry cohorts. I am not belittling any
of these issues but sometimes I think people
myself included begin to resemble a parody of
Peter Finch’s character in Network drained
by a sense of continual moral indignation. By the way
I have no cure of the issues I listed or the
metal state I have described if the post seems rambling
and disjointed that is actually the way my mind
often works.
Maybe this is a natural occurrence and the first step
leading to my friends and I taking our place on the porch
of life railing (sorry) against kids stepping on the grass.
So what is my point? I am attaching a link to crows in the snow.
Because this is in nature / poetry blog after all, to paraphrase
Arlo Guthrie Alice's Restaurant “remember Alice” remember the
nature / poetry blog.
While I have little hope we will respond to the damage
we are doing to the environment in any meaningful
way thanks to YouTube we can still have crows
in the snow and I think we need these small moments
these brief glimpses of those “other nations” that
surround us to disrupt our predictable days, our
shadow shelves providing our lives with a flash
of insight/illumination that may lead us to create
art or science or change or encourage us look
after ourselves and others or at least
provide us with a moment of joy or wonder.
I have included these shots of an Eastern Grey Squirrel
in my yard, remember the nature / poetry blog,
most of our squirrels are black but editing these pictures it
really drove it home to me that the black colour phase was
somewhat maladaptive because the black squirrels stick out
so much more in the landscape. Here the grey Grey
Squirrel blends perfectly with the tree trunk.
While not exhaustively tested Shaun and Whately
have no stated preference for the colour phase
of the squirrels they chase, it is all good.
“We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical
concept of animals. In a world older and more complete than
ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions
of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices
we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not
underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in
the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour
and travail of the earth.”
Henry Beston
The Outermost House
