The wind blew in my hair, and it felt good, the shade of the barn the smell of the horse all combined in an alchemy of scents that made it inviting and tranquil. The wind told me many things, and it spoke a lot about peace and understanding. All my life, I have walked a different path. Yes, it doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of life, but it mattered to me. I often take the rejection of people that are in my life personally, and I know I haven’t been an easy man to deal with. But, I am me, and I make no excuses or have no regrets. I get up every day, and I am honest to God; I try the best I can. The wind told many things about myself and the world, and I listened. The simple blowing in the wind was refreshing and, combined with the smells, it made me feel alive. I knew that everything worked out as it should, and it still hurt. The pain, hurt, and suffering makes a person feel real about life, and most people avoid it, but it teaches and shows lessons that can only be learned in this harshness.
As I walked to the barn in the yard was a fawn; it was curled up in a ball half-eaten and was in its infancy. The cruelty of the world was displayed in all its color and glory. It had been left at the edge of the yard, and the sun was hitting it just right. There was no remorse, sadness, not anything, just a PEACE in its grey, dead eyes. It was just another form of death in its many faces. It was in peace, and its journey had ended. I looked at it curled up in bone and gristle and fluids, and it had a beauty a placidity about it that said it is done. Maybe it is its life if it understood the beauty of life; I believe it did in God’s way. Perhaps it understood and just lived knowing that it was all right. I am sure it ran its natural programming and just lived not as we humans do but as a testament to the ways of life. Its death showed a lot about life.
Why do we as the human species think we know everything there is to know about life? That baby deer lived every day in its way, not knowing what was coming and its end, and it did without remorse or regret; it just lived. The exactness of nature in all its forms is something that I always love; that’s why I love being outside. Nature is real and alive, and its brutal realities seem chaotic to most people, but it speaks deeply to me. That baby deer came into the world with one goal in mind to live, to originate, and to die. This, to me, is beautiful.
I wonder if its birth did it have a wonder and joy of living, and it knew that every day was a good day. I believe it did. Instinct made it live every day, knowing that it might be its last, but it lived. It ate in the forest and evolved and lived, and it watched its mother and learned the ways of the forest. Yet it lived. It was an organism that knew its role in nature and just lived.
Now had I not found the body of the little deer, it would have set there, and nature would have taken its course. In the days and weeks, the little corpse would just slowly rot and go back to its beginnings. Scavengers would clean up the mess, and one day no one would even know that it had been there. Such is the passing of time in nature.
Now for the other citizens of the forest, death is actually an opportunity of life and its cycle. It’s an odd combination, but it is again why I love nature. To the buzzard the fawn, it is life. The death of one so little and defenseless gives even in its death–The rot, the blood-red sinew, the marrow, all stark realities of nature. Yet, it lives on in another form.
The cycle of life in the forest knew that while that little deer lived, it gave life, and in its role in this world, it also had to die. In its death, it did what death does; it gave life. One of the macrocosms of nature that is alive and provides a service is the buzzards. The carrion eaters of the forest, the death eaters, provide a nasty and disgusting service but once again is the ways of the forest. As they fly high, looking at the ground and soaring on the thermals hot and rising off the earth, they are to a part of the exactness of nature. Yet they live. The buzzard doesn’t think it’s gross, and to honestly look at them, they are nasty looking, yet they do what they do they eat the dead. They are the creatures that serve a purpose, and we will focus on them for a moment. The buzzards stomach I have read is a system built for death and the evolution of life. For without the buzzard, there is no nature. So, it soars high, always looking for something dead or close to it. Yet it lives. The buzzard, I am sure, is happy to eat and has no problem eating the dead. It does what its purpose is; it continues life. It consumes and poops, and life goes on. In its timeless way, nature moves on. In all its brutality, it functions as it suppose to.
Every creature of the forest, like the buzzard and the fowl, gives the validity of life in nature, and I like that. I like that when I eat a wild blackberry, I also eat the DNA of many things that have given life to something that will live again. It is the duality of nature. That which gives life will eventually live again. To live is to die, and to die is to be reborn in another form. Everything keeps giving.
When the wind in the shade of the barn blew in my hair and beard, I felt it give me a PEACE, a ticket to live life to its fullest, for death is always coming. Rejection in life is hard, and yet it is the way life is. We find this in nature every day, and it speaks to me, and it is when I am truly alive. Weep not for me and my realities but weep for the people that forget to live and are truly dead. For me, the wind blowing, and the stillness of early morning are reminders to live. Give me a wind blowing in the forest any day… speak to me wind and I will listen– for one day I will be no more. Yet, I will live on.
Always in service to nature,
Jonathan O.