Earlier today I was pecking away at my iMac researching genealogy software when I heard a resounding Thump at the window just a few feet away from me. There appeared to be a tiny speck of feather stuck to the glass so I slid my chair toward the window for a closer look. I thought a bird might have flown into the glass, perhaps injuring itself in the collision. Below and just a few feet from the window, part of nature’s drama was already nearing its final act: a Sharp-shinned Hawk was mantling the male Cardinal it had just caught. The relentless pursuit and the impeccable hunting skill of the Sharp-shinned Hawk and not the window pane had been the Cardinal’s undoing. Before I could manage to get outside the hawk flew off with its prey.
I’ve watched the world around me change in various ways as I have worked at home at my computer: from Bush’s spurious election to the presidency, his specious arguments for both foreign and domestic policies which include the on-going tragedy in Iraq precipitated by those polices and the corruption and scandal that have characterized this administration and debunked its credo that God directs the helm of state, the boom to bust building which continues to scar thousands of acres of fields, woods, and streams even after the sub-prime genie has long fled the shelter of its magic bottle, and coincidentally, the unadulterated wonder of life. Life without the prejudice of adjectives is improbable; how else can we bear witness to its passing?
How odd then, Rod Serling might intone, that just a year ago a similar scene was enacted: another Cardinal lost to the talons of a Red-shouldered Hawk. Nature comes with neither commentary nor instructions. We, however, see signs and symbols everywhere with which to fabricate descriptions that betray our own desires or prejudices. Perhaps Tennyson was speculating about our less sublime evolutionary shortcomings when he wrote in Canto 56 of In Memoriam:
- Who trusted God was love indeed
- And love Creation’s final law
- Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw
- With ravine, shriek’d against his creed
