On love and loss in the Wild

This past month I wrote a sympathy card to a mother who lost a daughter, and a daughter who lost a mother. So the weight of love and depth of loss was thick in the air. In our man-made world, we choose to siphon sickness and death away to hospitals and funeral homes and pray we aren't the ones making appointments there; until we are, until we inevitably are. Because we humans are part of the nature-made world, not the man-made one. We age and fade just like the autumns golden leaves. We even lose the youngest of lives, like a butterfly on-wing for just a few months.

Understanding and perspective, I have found, in books on ecology; where life and love and loss are all part of beauty of the wild.

"We will all die, she wrote, but we aren't born to die. We are born to begin....'Action,' Arendt wrote, 'is, in fact, the one miracle-working faculty of man.' "

- Lea Korsgaard in her book The Butterfly Season, reflecting on German philosopher Hannah Arendt

"When a seed's time finally comes, the root breaks through and grows down. The cotyledons, first leaves, pry open the shell and turn their green palms to the sky." 

- Hannah Fries in her book A Forest Language

When I read Fries quote I could not tell, even after rereading it many times, if she was describing an experience of birth or death, or transformation, or recreation. That was a comfort.