Outside, in light too dim for photographs, a bumble bee digs in contentedly to an echinacea flower. I'm happy to see there's at least one bee left in the world.
I sometimes forget to disconnect from the tediously competitive human world and pay attention to the remainder of nature - the bees, the slugs, the maple trees, the pollen, the microbes, the pine needles... all the other universes around me. I get caught up in notions of status and material wealth, and the tired old notions of us-vs.-them, the us being humans and the them being nature. The silly interpretation of our position as "conqueror." Clearly we need to coexist, and I am not being entirely realistic if I imply that mankind is somehow separate from nature. We emerged from it. We evolved with it. Why do we now want to conquer it? Co-existing in harmony seems more beneficial to both.
As our brains "evolved" however, we started to think a little too much. I don't have to think to enjoy watching a bee at its work. The bee doesn't complain, doesn't compare how much pollen it dispersed at the end of the day to its fellow bees. The battles in nature are not out of vanity, merely evolutionary necessity - survival of the fittest, as Darwin never said. At the end of the day, bees would never broadcast a show where each competed for cash prizes and fifteen minutes of fame/shame. They just do what they do.
Do we have an advantage because we can ponder "higher concepts"? I don't know, suppose I should meditate on that... for now, though, I'm just going to watch the snails outside the back door. They have just as good an answer as I ever will.
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Keep it civil or you'll go the way of the dodo.