Humans have changed the landscape of the earth ever since they settled down in one place and began cutting down trees. With modern technology we've been changing the earth at a devastating pace. But nature is resilient and ever evolving. Even if we were to kill half the life in the oceans and destroy half the landscape, nature measures time in millions and billions of years. It will endure. And if we aren't totally crazy, life forms will survive. I even wonder whether COVID isn't one of nature's adaptations to human life, a way of slowing us down to allow other life forms to escape our hunger to destroy.
But there is still much of nature to still awe and amaze us. The other night when the clouds had briefly left the Anchorage sky, I walked out onto the deck and tried to capture the beauty of the frosted trees in the backyard. The image on my iPhone was pretty dim, but editing tools on my laptop enabled me to get it back to what it actually looked like, and even more dazzling than it really was.
And Sunday we enjoyed one of my Anchorage winter highlights - the visit of the Bohemian Waxwings to harvest the berries on our Mountain Ash trees. They come in swarms of 30-50 birds, swooping down and then abruptly taking flight and then returning.
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ReplyDeleteWhat a beautiful piece you wrote, thank you. Yes nature does keep doing its thing. Humans are that, too, despite the erroneous belief of countless many, in that: we are separate from it, it is corrupted, and we are imperial to it.
ReplyDeleteWe are part of the ongoing constellation and dissolution.
Thanks.
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