"There is more to life than increasing it's speed."
-Ghandi
Wildlife watching offers a front row view to a fascinating world of drama and survival.
Wild animals lead secret lives all around us. The evidence they leave behind while we work, play, sleep and otherwise go about our lives reveals the exciting and the mundane, the life and death dramas, the animals relationships with one another and their relationship with their habitats.
All that is needed to help reconstruct these lives is a mixture of patience, a good imagination and a willingness to look closer, for you never know what types of encounters may be enfolding at your feet.
I found this quote by Barbara Kingsolver and it struck a chord:
"People need wild places. whether or not we think we do, we do. We need to be able to taste grade and know again that we desire it. We need to experience a landscape that is timeless, whose agenda moves at the pace of glaciers. To be surrounded by a singing, mating, howling commotion of other species, all of which love their lives as much as we do ours, and none of which could possibly care less about us in our place. It reminds us that our plans are small and somewhat absurd. It reminds us why, in those cases in which our plans might influence many future generations, we ought to choose carefully. Looking out on a clean plank of planet earth, we can get shaken right down to the bone by the bronze-eyed possibility of lives that are not our own."
