Of Chickens and Cliches

Our language is enriched by words and phrases that have become so commonplace we no longer freely react to them. When they reach that stage, we call them clichés, and their meaning grows dull. Yet their origin, their entrée into such common use, was based on the conciseness and effectiveness with which they captured truth. There’s another reason such phrases grow dull. It happens when our experience grows away from the truths they offer.

Take chickens, for example. I never had a close personal relationship with chickens, except on the dinner table. Until now. Unable to resist recurring temptation, I bought a few pullets (female chicks to the rest of us) recently, and was thrown into instant confrontation with certain linguistic realities. Already I know where we got the idea of “spring chickens,” who personify youth and vigor and innocence for the rest of us. I thought I understood “pecking order” as a concise description of a dominance hierarchy, but there’s more. It also, more benignly, tells the story of the first chick to wake up—her pecking wakes the others who then rush to join her at the feeder. “What, there’s food? Oh boy!” For me, pecking order isn’t just part of the cultural overlay of education or absorption anymore, it’s part of my direct experience.

Once upon a time, in this land not so long ago, most everyone lived with chickens and daily experienced certain chicken truths. “A chicken in every pot” was a well-understood promise on which a politician could ride to the White House, much the way “A MacDonald’s on every corner” might work today. It was a guarantee of abundance people could relate to, and it translated instantly into everyone’s experience. Today, chickens and eggs are “produced” on industrial “farms” without ever being touched by human hands.

Living with chickens, I’ll learn that “henpecked” describes a pretty grim reality , and that having “egg on your face” isn’t just a sign of shame but absolute proof of guilt, as it’s often the only way to tell which hen has developed the bad habit of egg-eating. I’ll find out whether chickens always come home to roost and maybe I’ll start going to bed with the chickens, as real farmers do. Maybe I’ll even figure out whether “egg money” and “chicken feed” ever strike a balance.

I’m sure I’m going to be learning a lot more from these birds, and it won’t just be old sayings. Attempting to raise chickens in the foothills will teach important Nature lessons too, and put my relationship with local predators on a whole new footing. Whether or not one plans to raise domestic animals for meat, there will be lessons of life and death, attachment and letting go. I’ll learn to let go when I have to share my chickens with local hawks and coyotes, just as I have with cats who disappear in the night now and then. I’ll learn to be more aware of and responsive to changes in weather and seasons, as I weigh their effects on the chickens and watch the hens’ behavior change with them. And, perhaps most important, I’ll learn (again) humility—when and how much interference Nature will tolerate—as I learn whether to try to save a weak chick or a sick bird, and whether human ingenuity and chicken wire can outsmart sheer hunger and determination on the part of local skunks and foxes.

If our experience with domestic animals is becoming limited—and how many of us have tried to lead a horse to water or bought a pig in a poke lately—so is our direct experience of wild animals. Although there are truths in some clichés, many others abound with contradictions. As our experience grows away from the roots of these expressions, how will we know which are which? If we neglect to sit and watch crows cavorting on the thermals near a cliff face, we won’t know how straight they fly. Without personal observation, we can’t be sure what “eating like a bird” really means, or where acorns fall in relation to their trees, or how big an oak will grow from one. It’s not books or teachers that tell us what happens when a twig is bent or an ill wind blows, but experience.

Our language would be far poorer without such sayings, but it’s easy to lose track of their true meaning. We've forgotten that “a bird in the hand” and the innocent nursery rhyme about “blackbirds in a pie” recall times and places when songbirds were (and still are) dietary staples, a practice we’ve come to deplore as we rely more and more on domesticated foodstuffs—including, of course, chickens!

I doubt I’ll ever solve the old riddle, but in my experience the chickens will come months before the eggs. With luck, I’ll learn what fresh eggs taste like sometime this fall. And above all, I’ll learn that chickens are true birds, with charming individual personalities and fascinating behaviors, not just wrapped packages in the supermarket. I’ll learn about instinct, as I watch day-old chicks grow into competent adults without a shred of parental guidance, an accomplishment we mammals can’t begin to match. Maybe I’ll even learn a few words in the rich assortment of clicks, whistles, and alarms with which the flock communicates. And I expect I’ll be learning chicken lessons until the cows come home.

Copyright, S.L. White, 2008. Illustration copyright Jan Ratcliffe.
Originally published in Upbeat, June 1996.

When Winter Comes: Strategies for Survival

Our world is surprisingly full of animals, even in our heavily developed areas. How does nature ensure that fullness? By paying a large price: Excess. This annual tax often comes due in winter. Every student of nature stumbles upon and must come to terms with the necessity for such excess. Charles Darwin once remarked upon the "clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low and horribly cruel works of nature." Henry David Thoreau sounded a somewhat more optimistic note: "I love to see that Nature is so rife with life that myriads can be afforded to be sacrificed and suffered to prey upon one another." Whatever we may think of this system, it works.

In the plant world, we find it useful to describe life cycles by their duration. For example, we understand some plants to be annuals that go from seed to seed in a single season, investing all their energy in the next generation. Others are perennials that take several seasons (or decades) to grow, reproduce, and die. The concept is equally useful when applied to animals. Some animals, especially among the insects, could be considered annuals, going from egg to egg in a single season or year. Even those who could live for years—potential perennials—often don't. Winter is one of the reasons for shorter lifespans.

Many insects invest any hopes they have for the future in an egg or pupa that is dormant during the cold months; most butterflies use this approach. Others, for example hornets, go from the abundance of a large "city"—the paper nest with its thousands of inhabitants—to a few adult queens, stocked with sperm for the following spring. At least one must make it through winter to begin again. On the average, one does. Ladybird beetles also go through winter as adults, coming together by the thousands each fall to hide in crevices and other sheltered places on mountaintops.

For animals large and small, winter success is often a matter of survival of the fattest. Stocking up enough reserve energy to get through the winter is especially important to those who will not look for food again until spring: bears, snakes and lizards, frogs and toads, hibernating ground squirrels, and many more. They sleep, gambling that the fat they've stored will last longer than the winter ahead.

Others remain active, using hidden food caches as pine squirrels and scrub jays do, or searching for food all winter as deer and elk do. Stocking up is still important, though. The more energy they've been able to store internally during summer's abundance, the better their chances of finding enough external food sources to get by.

Among birds, many escape the rigors of winter by migrating, but there is no escaping the annual tax, and no way the world can hold all the young produced each year. In 1991, volunteers for Hawkwatch International counted a thousand Sharp-shinned hawks migrating over one mountain ridge in Utah; almost half were immature birds making their first trip south. Only about one-third of those young birds will live to make the return trip. By our standards, this reflects an oppressive tax indeed; by nature's standards, it is a necessary one.

Our smallest winter-resident bird, the chickadee, lives all winter on a nutritional and energetic edge. In ten years, Aldo Leopold banded 97 chickadees on his Sand County farm. Only one survived five winters; 67 didn't make it past their first. But survival isn't just a lottery; much can depend on the decisions the animals themselves make. Read the chapter on chickadees that ends his Sand County Almanac—it's one of his best.

It seems likely that weather is the only killer so devoid of both humor and dimension as to kill a chickadee....To the chickadee, winter wind is the boundary of the habitable world....Books on nature seldom mention wind; they are written behind stoves.

—Aldo Leopold

It's no wonder, then, that animals do whatever they can to reduce the demands winter places on them, to increase their chances of being here come spring. Deer invade your yard to eat fall apples or early spring tulips; mice and squirrels, along with wasps and spiders, invade your house in search of warm spots where their limited stored energy will not be drained by cold. It's going to be a tough time to be outdoors, and somehow the animals know it. That wasp wedged under the bark in your woodpile may be the queen of a new city; the spider in the corner of your porch could found a new dynasty; the mouse in your basement is the matriarch of next summer's owl food. All are just doing the job nature assigned them at a time when she's not about to make that job easy.

——
Copyright, S.L. White, 2008. Illustration copyright Jan Ratcliffe.
Originally published in Upbeat, November 1994.

Secret Nights of Salamanders

Perhaps you can ignore the first time a salamander knocks on your door, but when it happens again, it’s time to pay attention. This soggy summer of ours has brought renewed encounters with Colorado’s only species, the tiger salamander (Ambystoma tigrinum). I hadn’t seen a wild one in six years, which says something either about our weather, or the nonexistent night life I’ve been leading! One night when my husband found one at the door about 2 a.m., I recalled my first encounters with these startling but delightful critters. I’ve also noticed lately that many people who have never met them are surprised to discover them here at all, and wonder what—and why— on Earth they are. The days may be ours, but the nights belong to them.

Field work in eastern Wyoming brought me my first encounters with tigers. After a day or more of good hard rain, suddenly our campsite was crawling with these large amphibians. Groping a damp tent floor in the dark to make sure none of them are planning on spending the night with you is not a great way to develop fond feelings for the slimy fellows, but it does get you wondering about their enigmatic lifestyle. Where, in a ten-thousand acre expanse of sagebrush (and little else), does a tiger salamander come from?

We think of the prairie as a dry place, albeit interrupted by stream channels or swales that are also usually dry. The evidence of water is there in the paths it has taken or the places it has rested, but it is rarely visible. The monsoon season we had this summer changed all that. At the Plains Conservation Center, a large preserve on the prairie east of Denver, water was everywhere. In pools and puddles, flowing down those abandoned-looking channels, and even filling the buffalo wallows. I imagine that, by now, amphibians too are everywhere, and not just on the prairie.

Taking advantage of all this moisture, adult salamanders leave the burrows where they’ve been hiding from our typical summer sun, and wander about, especially at night. Young salamanders, newly metamorphosed, are also on the move. Perhaps the rain, to salamanders, signals greener pastures or happier hunting for food or mates. Salamanders start life as eggs, then larvae, in ponds and pools in every county in Colorado. In dank muddy prairie potholes and cool subalpine ponds, they hatch and feed with their fellows. The larvae, with three gills on each side of their necks, are creatures who must live strictly in water. As they grow into adults, the gills are lost, and they venture out on land. Sometimes drying ponds push them into maturity a little early— the ones I saw this summer seemed very small for adult salamanders.

They were especially small compared to the growing monsters who live at the local Natural History Museum, where we have been impressed with the engaging personalities and voracious appetites of these easy-going amphibians. Alert and responsive, especially if there’s food in the offing, they are favorites of staff and visitors alike. Most visitors. One mentioned that, had she known such creatures prowled her backyard, she would have moved! It’s true they’re a bit slimy and strange looking, but they have cute faces, and you do grow to like them once you get to know them.

The sliminess we correctly associate with amphibians is part of their defense. The mucus layer over their skin contains antibiotics that help them resist infection. Like reptiles, amphibians also shed their skins as they grow. Instead of dry papery skins like snakes, though, they shed a diaphanous membrane, which they often eat. No sense wasting good protein. Sometimes I’ll see a ghostly hand floating in the tank, evidence of a recent shed, inside-out like a discarded glove. Because they spend so much of their lives in water, their skin is in constant contact with whatever the water brings, including some of the oxygen they need. Here salamanders, mythical creatures associated with fire, are truly playing with fire, as many of our waters bring pollutants that are also in direct contact with that critical layer of skin. Tiger salamander populations seem to have remained strong as other amphibians have begun to decline, but in recent years this may be changing, and some researchers are looking more closely.

Local populations of salamanders become adapted to specific conditions of their home areas, and that’s important in a species that occurs in such a wide variety of habitats and deals with drastically different conditions across its range. In fact, biologists warn us that some amphibians become so closely tied to their habitats that attempts to re-establish dwindling populations through captive breeding and release programs can hurt rather than help. Our one species is the only salamander in the entire state, but it has developed three locally distinct subspecies, each with a different color pattern. As a result of transport and release by fisherman, the original distribution has already become almost hopelessly mixed.

Although I normally wouldn’t recommend wild animals as pets, tiger salamander larvae are readily available under redeeming circumstances. Instead of capturing wild ones, you might consider liberating one or two from a bait shop. If you decide to put a tiger in your tank, be aware that you’re taking on a long-term commitment; these guys can live 20 years or more. Observing amphibians in captivity or in the wild can teach us a lot about the lives of these amazing animals who share our neighborhoods and wild places so secretively that most of us remain unaware of their presence.


Copyright, S.L. White, 2008. Illustration copyright Jan Ratcliffe.
Originally published in Upbeat, September 1997.

Not-So-Good Housekeeping

One year, we entertained a house spider from Thanksgiving to the Fourth of July. All winter I caught flies for her, operating on the theory that predators are a higher lifeform, more worthy of aid, than prey. Where did I get flies in the dead of winter? I forget, just lucky I guess. As time went on, her web on the ceiling in a corner of the bathroom became old and ratty, littered with souvenirs of her previous meals, but I couldn’t evict her. Where would she go? Actually, I felt honored she had chosen to move in with us, and curious to see what would happen. An eight-month experiment ended in failure: I never did learn the outcome. One night she seemed excited and alert; the next morning she was gone. Off to greener pastures I guess. She disappeared while I had a fly chilling for her in the fridge. (Did she ever wonder why her meals were colder than she was?) When we finally took her web down, it contained the remains of a dragonfly, several small moths, and the carcasses of innumerable houseflies. She was not a particularly tidy housekeeper.

Neither, you may rightly conclude, am I. I’ve noticed that men are rarely judged by their housekeeping, and then only if they’re sole householders. Women, whatever else they may accomplish in a productive lifetime, are still judged on how they keep a house. (Remember the discussions of Janet Reno’s somewhat casual lifestyle after she was nominated for Attorney General?) There’s an old saying “An immaculate house is a sign of an extremely boring woman [person].” Let’s just call those of us who choose otherwise “creative housekeepers,” shall we? A friend of similar persuasion doesn’t like to kill houseflies—so she just stuns them and feeds them to her frogs!

Another time I brought a near-frozen orb weaver in out of a December snowstorm. She stayed several days, then one night I found her walking across the living room, and she too disappeared. I’ve even watched a wolf spider attack and kill a black widow here in the house, and I finally unraveled the mystery of why spiders are found in bathtubs. By the way, if you don’t want to scoop them up, you can hang a strip of toilet paper over the edge for them to climb out on. That’s creative housekeeping!

Probably my tolerance for spiders is higher than most people’s.
(I definitely don’t like them in bed, though. Eew.) Or maybe it’s because of the background in biology, and meeting lots of people who grow strange things at home—a respectable tradition among biologists. Remember that Darwin kept earthworms on the piano, not that his wife Emma appreciated it much.

I’ve rescued tiger salamanders from the garage, found hatchling yellow-bellied racers in the kitchen, let a baby towhee sleep overnight in the study, and chased young scrub jays in the bay window. Most of those encounters were courtesy of the cats, I suspect. But some wildlife find their way in on their own. There’s nothing like coming face to face with a skunk in the kitchen at midnight! That happened a few times before we got a cat door installed. Now I suspect they’ve learned to use the cat door too, and it’s wise to remember to put the cat food up off the floor during skunk season! I’m happy to say we have never had a skunk “accident” inside though. Besides, I’m pretty sure they do it on purpose.

You know you’ve created a permeable household when the bees start hitting on your houseplants. One year, the nectar dripping from the flowers on my waxplant (Hoya carnosa) attracted a honeybee who could not possibly have recognized or remembered this plant. I also found a mature seed pod on my “hearts entangled” vine (Ceropegia)—documenting that at least one intruder was successful in pollinating its complex flower. Ecology is the science of the “household,” after all, and this is ecology in action.

My mother believed there were more important things in life than housekeeping, and certainly more important parts to the business of childhood than learning to wash dishes or being forced to take on adult responsibilities at a tender age. That example has brought me both blessings and banes, but it did leave us free, as children, for the explorations so necessary to discovering and growing to understand the world. Adults call it play, but that’s a grown-up abstraction that grossly oversimplifies the process.

The more I see the effects of “good housekeeping,” the more deeply I appreciate that I was never trained to be a sterilizing force on the planet. Our dependence on chemical poisons (called cleaning products) is frightening. Thankfully we are beginning to rediscover more benign alternatives—vinegar, baking soda. Overly fastidious people may not feel comfortable in my house, but most other beings will find welcome. A living creature, whether two- or four- or six- or eight- or no-legged, any creature that enters our house has a good chance of getting out alive. Knowing that gives me pleasure, and a certain sense of pride.


Copyright, S.L. White, 2008. Illustration copyright Jan Ratcliffe.
Originally published in Upbeat, February 1997.

The River of Life

You can never step twice into the same river.
—Heraclitus

There is a river, they say, at the bottom of some oceans. A current aswarm with life below fathoms of sterile water. I have never seen it. But here, six thousand feet above the top of the ocean, I have seen its like.

One day this place, for all I could tell, could have been the bottom of the ocean. Even here at six thousand feet, an ocean of air floats above us. The foothills slopes nearby suddenly became undersea cliffs and canyons. Between me and those canyons, the river of life flowed, drifted rather, slowly northward. Millions of minute creatures were made visible by the setting sun behind it. Trapped in the current, they moved generally northward, while indulging a random dance of their own. Bottom-dwellers such as I could only sit and watch the river go by. Under the sudden weight of a mile of atmosphere, it would have been difficult to move. The perception was so abrupt, and so complete, I wanted to gasp for air.

The second time I saw the river, it was invisible, so the perceptual shift was less abrupt. Only the presence of the birds, darting in and out of the current as if they were sharks or huge plankton feeders, made it visible. Hundreds of gulls and nighthawks and swallows swirling southward. The aerial plankton were on the move again-- this could only be a feeding frenzy. I never saw the creatures on which the birds fed, presumably insects; only the river of birds moving down the valley between the hogback and the foothills, spiraling with the current from one side of its channel to the other.

Seeing the river will never, I hope, become commonplace. By the third time, however, I recognized it immediately. A nighthawk or two might be allowed; a swarm of them in midday is a clear omen. We walked into the river this time, and stood in its path. Hundreds of nighthawks swirled around us, some almost brushing our shoulders, all oblivious to our presence. They seemed equally oblivious to passing cars, but I saw none hit despite their bold dives and swoops. An apparent hatch of insects along the wetter Gunnison River had invoked this river, clearly another aerial feeding frenzy.

As a biologist, I had been taught of the existence of an aerial biota. I "knew" that scientists had found insects, spores and seeds thousands of feet above earth. But that was book learning, second-hand knowledge. My mind knew, but it had never told my heart. I had never seen the river.

In these days, when the word "media" has come to mean TV, radio and newspaper, we forget that the contact between land and air is as dramatic as that between water and air or land and water. These are the true media with which we live. We live in such an empty world most of the time. Why do we trick ourselves into believing that the air is a void, that the rivers and lakes contain only water, that the very earth, the soil itself, is sterile? Science tells us otherwise, but it does not tell our hearts.

We are rightly fascinated by the underwater discoveries Jacques Cousteau brings into our living rooms, but we know so little, experience so little, of our own every day media. The air and water and land around us, close at home, are equally alive. For the most part that life is unseen and unappreciated.

Our 20th-century media cannot tell our hearts the real news. Some evening before sunset, go out into the media that are as old as time. Perhaps you will also see the river of life firsthand. Perhaps you too will see that our "empty" air is as full of life as any ocean. Then you will know that we live within a river of life, surrounded by more than we ever know.

but look! round about you beings live their life,
and to whatever point you turn you come upon being.
—Martin Buber, I and Thou

———
Originally written 1992.

The Importance of Being Alone

In what concerns you much, do not think that you have companions; know that you are alone in the world.
—Henry David Thoreau

Some days even the dog is too much company. To walk up the mountain with someone, human or canine, is to have a companion for the duration of the hike. To go alone is to have the world as a companion. Company can be more distraction than comfort. Walking alone sharpens the senses, opens one's perceptions to the rest of the world. Alone it is possible to converse with the whole reality, and to hear its quiet messages.

Our tolerance for alone-ness and silence (its usual companion), may determine the quality of our experience with the mountain. After all, how much of the noise that surrounds us is made by our fellow humans? Walking alone removes some of that noise and may even quiet the voices in our heads—making room for the soft voices of creation to reach us: The wind in pine trees, the rustle of dry leaves on poison ivy stems, a distant bird-chirp or lizard-scuttle dashing from bush to bush.

Absence of companions may be considered positive or negative, may be called either loneliness or solitude; but for absence of noise we have only positive connotations: silence, quiet, stillness, calm, lull, serenity, hushed, peaceful…

Perhaps our ability to distinguish the ache of loneliness from the poignant joy of solitude, and experience both as appropriate, measures us individually and collectively. We live in a world that offers few opportunities for solitude or silence. Are aloneness and silence voids we must hasten to fill, even when we can only fill them inadequately? Or can we learn to appreciate them for the rare opportunity they are—the opportunity to experience the incredible fact that we are never alone in this world?

How many more generations will pass
before it will have become nearly impossible
to be alone even for an hour, to see anywhere
nature as she is without man's improvements upon her?
How long will it be before—what is perhaps worse yet—
there is no quietness anywhere, no escape from
the rumble and the crash, the clank and the screech
which seem to be the inevitable accompaniment of technology?
Whatever man does or produces, noise seems to be
an unavoidable by-product. Perhaps he can,
as he now tends to believe, do anything.
But he cannot do it quietly.

Perhaps when the time comes that there is no more silence
and no more aloneness, there will also be no longer
anyone who wants to be alone.
—Joseph Wood Krutch

— — —
Originally written 1989.

Seeing Things: Single Visions

These things, these things were here
and but the beholder wanting.
—Gerard Manley Hopkins

What about the things you know you will only see once in life? Those rare happenings we are occasionally privileged to witness are a special gift. The foothills seem to favor opportunities for serendipity, for the unusual events that engender the unique sights of life. This wonderful in-between world, neither mountains nor plains but with some of the flavor of both, somehow captures a special essence. Today was that kind of a day.

As weather goes, fog is unusual in Denver, but it is even more so in the foothills. On fall mornings we may wake to a bright clear day, with an achingly blue sky, only to find that Denver and its surrounding lowlands are a sea of fog. The hogback seems to act as a dam, holding back the fog, keeping the foothills and mountains clear.

On one such morning, the fog found a low spot in the hogback, and poured westward—a waterfall of wet air, flowing over the ridge and down the valley to settle in Morrison. In other parts of the world, fog seems merely to be—it just sits; but here on the edge it is an active agent whose movements we sometimes glimpse.

This morning was white, even here above the 6000 foot contour. Recognizing an unusual opportunity, I hurried to be on the mountain before it burned off, as the weather man assured us it would. I had barely started before I began to outreach the fog and entered a more typical morning of bright sun and clear skies. But the visions made possible were special indeed. Denver was gone, lost in the mist, but not missed. The very top of Green Mountain was an island, as was Mt. Glennon, adrift in a sea reminiscent of the one that once contained the hogback. One tip of stone was all that remained of Red Rocks Park. The fall colors were brilliant—from red-purple of sumac, to oranges and yellows, all the greens from gray-green to blue-green, all the grass colors from straw to the pink-red of the bluestems—amid all this, what's the attraction of the monochrome of mountain aspen?

But there were more single visions in store, only this once, and only for me, for no one else was there to see them. Coming down, a sight I had missed in my fascination with "Green Island"—a river of white along Bear Creek, barely glimpsed through the trees, but clearly separating Mt. Morrison from Mt. Falcon more completely than Bear Creek ever has.

Unusual, as well as unusually brief, was the vision around the next corner. Perhaps memorable sights are forgotten because they can be so brief we question whether we saw or imagined them. The fog I thought I had left far below had come up behind me—advancing a couple hundred feet in elevation when I wasn't looking. And there it was, in huge breakers, crashing against the foothills as if to engulf them. This was no ordinary fog, but fog with an agenda. The sunny slope, where foxes had played last spring, was now similarly inundated. And seconds later, barely giving time to be noticed, the fog retreated, ebbing down the valleys like a tide that's peaked and lost its momentum, becoming normal quiescent water vapor again. By the time I reentered its cold dampness, it was its old familiar self, and it just continued to lay there until, as predicted, it burned off and the reality of a normal day returned.

It left one more vision, a reminder of the abundance of life in our small local universe. Everywhere in the grass were tiny, three-dimensional spider webs, suddenly visible with the dew. About two or three inches in each diameter, each web was hundreds of threads woven by some spider-being too small to be noticed under normal conditions. But, presumably during the night, these many creatures had been busy, leaving evidence of their existence to day-bound creatures. Once I had seen a similar dance of life, in the air we usually consider sterile. Backlit by a setting sun, the air suddenly appeared alive with insects, bits of down carrying seeds off to new locations, a host of living things going about their business in a medium we consider only as a blend of gaseous elements.

These occasions, too brief and too rare, remind us how little we see most of the time. And they tell us, if we will pay attention, how special is this place in which we live. I wonder how many of these moments, these single visions, I've missed on the days I don't take time to walk up the mountain, or on days when my attention is elsewhere. We are fortunate indeed to share this special place. But how long will it remain a special place if we don't pay attention to it? What will happen if we neglect the everyday beauties and the extraordinary single visions that surround us? Maybe we're already beginning to discover the costs of our failure to appreciate the world we share.

... of nature's poems and pictures we are invited to become a part.
—Joseph Wood Krutch

———
Originally written 1989.