Lounging on the flight deck at the Bosque de Apache bird refuge, it is easy to believe that the world is alive. Hundreds of snow geese bark in the distance. Wood ducks scurry for safety as a northern Harrier glides over the shallows. Sandhill cranes resembling ancient pterodactyls soar in from the pre-Pleistocene to alight on the marshy mud flats just beneath the mirrored water that reflects an infinity of sky. Two cranes neck ostentatiously: there is no other word for the affection of these pair-bonded, lifetime mated birds. They are making out. Here in the late afternoon sun of southern New Mexico, how can you doubt that love is the secret sauce that lubricates the world?
“When despair for the world grows in me,” wrote the poet Wendell Berry, “I go and lie down where the great heron feeds, and where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water.” The peace of wild things assures us that despite the appalling stupidity, hubris and short-sightedness of our species, something older and wiser than we are has a hand in events. Narcissism is not nature’s way. A more generous, joyful and amorous spirit presides. Darwin called it evolution: an amazingly simple, almost self-evident idea in retrospect, but one that somehow eluded the most intelligent minds for centuries. One wonders. Are there other equally obvious truths that we overlook today--rules of conduct that are integral to the world’s maintenance and survival, but that are still to be discovered?
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