On townfolk and death

So, a buddy of mine was here today to help out as a way to return a favor for something we helped him with. A city guy. He's a strong fast guy and was a lot of help (we took care of a few trees that fell down since beginning of the summer). Then the weirdest thing happened -

We're walking by a very dead tree and I have a chainsaw in my hand. Naturally, I want to fell it before it goes down by itself and God forbid lands on something or somebody. I felled it down and he notices a nest there, with a few baby birds, probably a day old or so. Miraculously, 3 of them survived the fall. Oh, crap. I feel pretty bad about that but what can you do? There was no way for me to know that there was a nest but what can I do now? So, I suggested we leave them where they are and hope that the parents will come back and help them. Not sure how they can help such young babies though, but once again - are there really any other options?

Well, this guy puts them in a box and starts calling various rescue services and naturally they all closed but even if they weren't - what could they do? Why would they want to? Anyway, he keeps that for a about 30 mins, than takes the chicks home to care of them. Huh?

Don't get me wrong - this is NOT a story about what a silly bird he is. He's actually a pretty smart guy and very decent human being. To me that just shows how successful humans were during the last few decades in creating a bubble separating them from the real life.

Real life has death as its major part - there is no life without death. Something must die for something else to live, no exceptions. When you live on a farm you're always aware of that because you're basically in the middle of 24/7 killing spree that is the nature but in a big city it's possible to lock yourself in a made-up sanitized version of the reality, where death doesn't exist. Up to a certain point when you're rudely awakened, of course.

Another thing that is pretty much lost on many modern people - life is a lottery. You can be good, and you can be innocent and you still can die horribly - shit happens. That's the way nature operates - these woodpeckers decided to make the nest on this very tree and I happened to walk by with a chainsaw. By the way, if my friend didn't come today, I probably wouldn't get to that pasture with the chainsaw for another two months. Or like that time when I was going somewhere with our dogs and they almost stepped on a wild rabbit family but didn't notice them. 3 dogs - what were the chances of that? The momma and 2 babies sat tight right there in short grass and each dog almost stepped on them, literally. If the dogs saw them, they'd be dog food in about 0.5 second. The dogs didn't see them, they didn't smell them ...

It often seems that there is no higher sense or purpose in the nature (or may be it's hidden too well) - it looks more like one huge lottery. Like that squirrel who was may be the best mom in the world and fought like a tiger to get to her babies but she just happened to build the nest in the wrong place in the wrong time. That was not her fault - she had no idea these weird contraptions were lambing jugs and she had no way of knowing the spring lambing time was coming, so a big scary human will walk in there (for the first time in a few months!) with his big scary jack russel who will ony need about 10 seconds to find her nest. Certainly the baby squirrels were not guilty of anything. Didn't help them any.

People can somewhat isolate themselves from that lottery for a while but I think it's mostly imaginary isolation. We all are part of it. We are drawing our tickets every minute whether we like it or not. And we all will die at some point, which is perfectly natural (and is great, actually), and the only thing you can do about it is to produce lots of babies and make sure they survive and develop to be successful in their environment.

Well, isn't it funny - I had to study philosophy in college just to come to what fish, insects and animals of every kind have known for millions of years... I think I'll go out to the pasture and see if I can get some more secret knowledge from the sheep :)