I awoke two weeks ago to find fawn sleeping in my backyard. Today I found a mother turkey and her poult in the front yard. A turtle last week. Groundhog. Rabbit. Sundry birds, including hawks, crows, bluebirds, cardinals, and a bunch of little birds I can’t name. Worms and ants in the ground, raccoons, opossum, squirrels, both grey and red, chipmunks, field mice. Plants growing in the gutter. Weeds wherever they want to grow; saplings of maples, tulip poplars, oaks, and hickory. Occasionally, my yard fills with friends and relatives, and maybe even a Jehovah’s witness direct from God to my front door—All telling me that whatever I believe about owning my house and land, I’m living a fiction. My home isn’t really mine. I need to look into the mirror of pride to see the humble being who temporarily occupies the dwelling, trims the plants, and cuts the grass.
We might all be guilty of pride at times. It is, after all, the first of sins. The first of weaknesses. Wasn’t it pride behind the Garden of Eden story? Wasn’t it pride Shelley addressed in “Ozymandias,” the poem about the trunkless stone legs in the desert with a boast on the pedestal? Great little verse. “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;/Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!/Nothing beside remains….” * Because I believe the human condition is a long-standing one, I assume that the citizens of Göbekli Tepe in Turkey or Tell Qaramel in Syria also had their Ozymandias’ moments eleven or twelve millennia ago.
So, I know, that like Ozymandias’ kingdom, someday my home will belong to another human, to other species, or to Nature in general. But in the meantime, I will share my dwelling with, apparently and sometimes involuntarily, the woods and the wild. That’s a humbling lesson.
We might all be guilty of pride at times. It is, after all, the first of sins. The first of weaknesses. Wasn’t it pride behind the Garden of Eden story? Wasn’t it pride Shelley addressed in “Ozymandias,” the poem about the trunkless stone legs in the desert with a boast on the pedestal? Great little verse. “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;/Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!/Nothing beside remains….” * Because I believe the human condition is a long-standing one, I assume that the citizens of Göbekli Tepe in Turkey or Tell Qaramel in Syria also had their Ozymandias’ moments eleven or twelve millennia ago.
So, I know, that like Ozymandias’ kingdom, someday my home will belong to another human, to other species, or to Nature in general. But in the meantime, I will share my dwelling with, apparently and sometimes involuntarily, the woods and the wild. That’s a humbling lesson.
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