The Wisdom of Nature

Today I sat on my back deck, engaged in my favorite activity; bird watching.  After my now monthly Entyvio infusion for my Crohn’s Disease I often don’t feel well, so I took the rest of the day off, and as the weather was good, I watched birds.  I have a couple of bird feeders up, and I enjoyed watching the little birds come and eat, and do their bird things while I watched and let the world slip away for a bit. What I found is that there are things to learn from these little creatures.  Owls may be wise, but even the little birds can teach us a thing or two.

Keeping it Simple

Birds, like other animals, have a knack for keeping life simple. Live or die. The ultimate binary choice. Nature has handed them the simplest of decisions, do what you can to live, or cease to be. Birds are not burdened by politics, hierarchies, or whether the other birds like them.  Other birds are either a threat or they are not.  If they are a threat, you fly to safety.  If they’re not a threat, you go on doing what you need to do.  A binary choice mirrored throughout the animal kingdom.

A flock of sparrows came to visit.  Approximately 20 or so at a time.  I call them Compies, after the tiny dinosaurs in Jurassic Park.  

They swarm in, raise a ruckus for a few minutes, then move on to some other area, holding Sparrow Court throughout the neighborhood.  I watched a mother and father feeding their young.  The baby bird squatted on the ground, rustling its wings with its mouth open.  It is clearly signaling for more food. What I didn’t see were the parent sparrows opining on how hard it was to parent.  They didn’t harangue their kids about what they wanted to be when they grew up, or reminded them to put their shoes by the door.  The baby was hungry, and mom and dad gathered food to feed it.  They showed the baby the ropes, how to get food from the feeder, and how to hide when the hawks flew overhead. They kept it simple. Live or die.

Hierarchies

I noticed another thing as I watched.  There were no true hierarchies.  Sparrows did not

give deference to Cardinals, Robins or Blue Jays.  Size was no determinant either, as smaller House Finches pushed aside Sparrows and other birds to get to the seeds. Eat or don’t eat, live or die. 

Life for an animal is a string of binary choices.  Animals don’t demonstrate for better living conditions.  I certainly don’t open my back door to see birds gathered together with picket signs and tiny little bullhorns.  Birds don’t complain about how the other birds treat them.  They eat or don’t eat, live or die.

Binary Choices

Humans like to think life is complex.  We add layer after layer of grey to our binary lives. We add cares and opinions and expectations and slights, perceived or real, to the way that we see life, and those around us.  We crush ourselves under the weight of the life we have created for ourselves. We will sit and drink coffee, tea or something stronger and wish for a simpler life.  We lose sight of the fact that we are in control of how we react to what happens to us.  It starts at the core, a binary choice that should drive all others. Live, or die?