‘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.

http://boingboing.net/2013/02/20/crows-have-fun-on-snow-covered.html

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