There's a tree outside my bedroom window and I'll often just watch the birds flying in and out. At times there'll be a pair of doves in there huddled-up on a branch. There's a simple, quiet calm about them just going about their day doing their thing. While we spend our time chasing our tails, drowning in a sea of bullshit, often of our own creation, these beautiful creatures having seemingly cracked the code of what this life malarkey is all about. Taking time out to observe nature I find acts as a reminder at times of what's important in our own lives and what is not. Actually reminds me of this speech from a favourite film of mine...
"...they don't have time to bother with the success of getting rich, don't have fantasies of glory, don't borrow money to buy things to decrease the value of while they own it, see, they are beautiful because they just are. They do what they do. Lion don't try to be a tiger, rabbit don't try to do an impression of a monkey. They don't try to be what they are not. Not like us, we human beings. The cheetah, the tiger, the snake, the monkey, the baboon, the muskrat, the bobcat, the pig that's fat, the hippo, the rhino, the dodo, the honey badger, the slithy toad, each one, each perfect in their own original form. Then man came in. Who created him, or for what purpose, is still a mystery. Why is he here? It's a mystery. We know he's trespassing, doesn't know his own place. Of course he doesn't know his own place, he doesn't have one. Man, the bear hunter, the fur trapper, the deer chaser, the baby seal clubber, the dolphin snagger, lowest form of existence, lowest form of existence... He goes around sticking his nose where it doesn't belong. The zoo, the aquarium, they are prisons for the animals, those animals can't learn anything from man, man don't have a thing to teach them. I don't even like looking at human beings, they disgust me so much with their atom bombs, their blowdryers, their automobiles. They build hospitals as a shrine to the diseases they create. Human beings, along with their secrets, masked and anonymous... If I see a crack in the sidewalk, to me it's more beautiful than any human being. A crack in the mud at the bottom of a sundried dead lake, I count that more beautiful than any human being. You know what I mean?"
"Yeah, I know what you mean, it's kind of like a curse being born." |