In nature

I am struck by something. Not drops of water kicking up from my flashing feet. I am struck by the nature of my nature and the nature of my Person's nature. To be blunt, she isn't natural. She likes to be outside and she loves birds and trees and rocks. But she isn't at one with nature. It doesn't seem that people are.

People are too apart from nature, living in houses, wearing shoes. They don't know how to find tasty treats in leaf litter or smell what other creature has been walking by. They may like to name nature but they don't really understand nature because they aren't quite in it. Today my Person was naming birds. How silly! One had a fancy name - blue headed vireo. She saw it, pronounced the fancy name, and felt she knew something. Hah! She knows nothing. That name is just a human invention.

She doesn't understand what she sees even if she can give it a fancy name. As we walked a lot of birds were calling. She thought it was interesting, and she stopped to look at them. She was so busy trying to name them she forgot to notice what they were doing. Well, they were trying to scare away that big bad hawk! Finally she began to understand. Later we came across a huge dog. I wanted to scare it away and started barking at it. She didn't understand I was doing the same thing those valiant birds had been doing. She actually told me to be quiet! Would she have told those birds to be quiet?

Well, they wouldn't have listened, and for the record, neither did I.