Late Winter Travels and Thoughts

Renee and I will be taking a little break from the winter/spring weather to visit friends and take in a Tiger’s game in Lakeland. But before we leave, I wanted to share some thoughts.

When we think of all creatures as inferior to us, we really need to rethink our big brain. How is it a bee can come back to the hive and tell all the other bees where flowers are and give them directions to those flowers? Can you do that? Or the aphids that find food by scent, smelling the nitrogen (protein) in the plant leaf and finding their way to the plant….can you smell protein and more to the point, can you smell it from a half mile away? What about the mycorrhiza that find the plant in need and share some of the food they have found. What about ants, millions of ants that build a community and harvest bacteria and fungi to grow food for their young? Oh, there will be many saying that’s just instinct.

All these animals have ways to communicate with one another but we don’t know how to communicate with them; maybe we need to learn their language. All living things communicate by language, we just don’t understand them.

            So much of my reading this winter is steering me to rethink our place on this planet. We are not the supreme being, we are just one of many creatures on this planet. None of us are any more special than the other. A 200 year old tree isn’t just a piece of wood to be cut down, it’s a citizen of the planet, been here much longer than any of us. Yes, we can go buy a chainsaw and cut that tree down in minutes. Nature is no match for our ability to destroy.

Maybe when we start looking at nature as a person we will wrap our brains around a different way to look at nature.  I mean everything; the air we breathe, the birds that sing, the bees that hum, the spring peepers in the wetlands, the resting plants that rise out of the ground from there winter nest and humans that yearn to get back into the woods. We are all part of a whole and we are all part of making this planet our home. And, to my knowledge we have not found another Earth out there so we better start taking care of what we have been blessed with.