As I stand here looking at a small corner of the forest, all I can see is dead leaves and dry fallen branches. The nature came to a rest. I can feel a breeze on my face, but down there, close to the ground, I can’t notice any movement. I am sure there might be a scared bug or a paralyzed by fear mouse looking at me perfectly camouflaged under the dead matter. What do they think of me? I do not know. They might think I am crazy bipedal, staring at a point with no purpose at all, and they might be right to think so. Or, they see me as a ferocious predator waiting patiently for a small move, a slightly perceptible mistake on their end to charge, and they might be right as well. In nature it seems to be no good or bad. Everything is just what it is, nothing more.
The human created the good and bad based on their own perceptions. If I pick a small rock and throw with minimal strength, it will definitely hit a manmade structure, a brick, a plank or a patch of cement. We intruded into the wilderness with our inventions. What kind of animal evolution made of us? We’re powerful and weak at the same time. Predators we are, but we feel pity for our prey. We ate it and then we feel sorry for its faith. If we have to face a wild thing barehanded, we fall in anguish and fear. The smallest insect can shock us, the faintest crack of a dead branch can send our pulse to a run. And still we are mastering the earth, with our good and our bad.
We separate ourselves from the other beasts by our creativity, the result of our restless minds, the materialization of our imagination.
I look around at the banks of this river and I see the mud, a dirty slime of wet dirt deposited by the retreating water. It looks disgusting to me, the human, but it’s just nature, no good, no bad. Seagulls don’t seem to be bothered. They carelessly walk over, dipping their beaks in search of food. The glorious food, the fuel of our existence. Food for which we dig, we burn, we crush, we strike and… we kill. Pour souls of us humans can’t comprehend why we have to do harm, but hunger pushes us to go ahead with the killing, with the destroying. We think that in our intercourse with nature; we are the rapers, but this is a unilateral point of view.
I walk further. More trail is opening ahead, and here I get close to the highway. The engines are roaring. Can’t say if they’re riding or flying just from the noise. The air fills with toxic gases and I have to return. A mother deer and a fawn are crossing the path in front of me, maybe those that I wrote about in my previous post. We all freeze and look at each other studiously. We have nothing to say or to exchange; it is just an encounter. I go home now in the town of twenty thousand people and thirty thousand dogs, through the park. It used to be snowing here at this time of the year. Now it feels like springtime, with a snow that melted before it even came to exist, just like some of our dreams.
But as I said, there is no good or bad, everything is what it is! We are liberating ourselves from bad habits just to gain some other bad ones. Today we’re here mastering this planet. Tomorrow we might get on another one and take it all over again, or we might be nowhere at all. We are an invisible spot on a small grain of time.
words-of-mine 