Tag: Nature
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God hath given you one face, and you make yourself another.
I’ve never been much on religion; my mother, an immigrant from Britain, was once an Anglican, and my Canadian father a Baptist. The compromise they settled on for my upbringing was the United Church of Canada for some reason. It was a religious choice that, unlike my father’s, allowed dancing, although it still seemed a…
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The poems the earth writes upon the sky
I don’t know… ever since I read Suzanne Simard’s ‘Finding the Mother Tree’ a few years ago, I’ve felt differently about plants -about Nature. Simard, a professor of Forest Ecology at the University of British Columbia, ‘is known for her work on how trees interact and communicate using below-ground fungal networks, which has led to…
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Experience is of no practical value; it is merely the name we give to our mistakes
We’re curious creatures, we humans; in our Western society at least, it is a common conceit to think we are so unique that we’ve each taken a different route to end up where we are; we’ve followed unexpected detours, braved gravel roads that wound through thick, unnamed forests; got lost innumerable times until we found…
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Would that we might also pray in the fullness of our joy
Prayer! I think I should be careful here: I have no enduring patience for obsequiousness in the face of eternity; I would not beseech a god, or gods, to treat me well. And yet… And yet perhaps there is some benefit to discussing a problem with a higher power -a different power anyway: laying it…
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The antic disposition
I don’t know what it is about bats that unnerves me. I mean I suppose they’re cute and everything -or at least they would be if they sat in the trees in my garden and sang, or maybe visited flowers like butterflies in the afternoon. But I’ve never seen them engaged in everyday domestic chores…
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I am the Tumbleweed
I am the tumbleweed; I realized it I when I saw the lonely little thing blowing across the dawn sand in Gisborne. Its arms, for all the good they did, were extended like an inquisitive octopus feeling for its way; not lost, exactly, but indifferent about where it ended up. Anywhere is as good as…
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Art thou not sensible to feeling as to sight?
I had an extraordinary experience the other day: one that I’ve had several times before, but never so… profound. Never so personal. I’m not one to deny epiphanies, but it wasn’t anything like the one that the Christian apostle Paul was said to have experienced on the road to Damascus: no voices accusing me of…
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Flutterbys
Perhaps we live our lives in parts, segments that seem distinct only in retrospect. But now that I consist of gnarled limbs and painted, fragile leaves already heavy with the luxury of years, I am allowed think of butterflies as ephemeral markers, unlikely bookmarks in my life. I’m not really sure when this idea took…
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Oh wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here.
There are times when it’s all too much -or perhaps, all too little. Here I am close to the end of my season, and to borrow from Macbeth, ‘My way of life is fallen into the sear, the yellow leaf.’ So what is left? What remains of what I wore in the heat of youth?…
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