Emulating Nature

We live adjacent to a large wooded park. Big Creek flows toward Lake Erie at the northern end of our property, so there's a lot of wild animals and birds running around all the time, especially this time of year (May). The young birds, and little mammals are literally everywhere. Any time we go outside and head to the garden birds and rabbits and squirrels either watch cautiously or run away into tall grass with every foot step. When I'm out working in the garden or in the yard, birds are flowing by like a river as they go about their business. It's the way the world should be.

The flipside of the abundance of life is a correspondingly large amount of death and destruction and injury. It's pretty common to find the leftovers of a raptor's meal in some random location in the yard. It's somewhat less common to find an injured animal, usually a young animal in some spot. Sometimes they "tap out" and look for help.

It's a pretty rare case where a human can intervene and help the animals or birds and get them back outside. Usually if they're hurt or sick enough to approach a human, they're really on deaths doorstep anyway, and it's best to leave them alone. But in some cases, it's possible to help them out, and get them back to health.

This past week, for example, a baby hare survived a bird attack and came up to the deck of the house. I took him inside and gave him some food and water and rest for a couple of days. He lost an eye to the bird, and needed some time to adapt to loss of 50% of his field of vision. He actually recovered quickly and regained some coordination, so I put him back out there into the world. His healthy sibling is still out and running around in the tall grass and his mother actually comes around to tend to them during the mornings and evenings. I doubt he'll live long, but he got a slightly better chance with some intervention.

The series Longmire is a fairly generic TV show, but it's got some decent moments and some thoughtfully written characters too. One of the good characters on the show is a Crow Indian Tribe medicine woman Marilyn. She is a characterization of Nature. She's neutral but benevolent and favors life and the good. For example, she'll help out the main characters in the story, but not too much.

The natural, real world, as I've tried to describe many times in this blog, transcends the symbols and archetypal models we've got in our heads. The built-in archetypes and symbols in us are related to it, but in a fairly mysterious way. We mostly feel our connection to the natural world and our place in it, rather than comprehend it.

The actions of the Marilyn character in the show are a pretty good depiction of that--probably one of the only depictions of it I've seen.