The natural world offers beauty to us. On any given day we can look at the world around us and see something that takes our breath away, if we are open to it. It is fascinating to be in an environment that is less familiar to me, where the natural world shows itself in so many different forms than I am used to. As we drove South, it was wonderful to see the gray and white landscape give way to greens, and eventually to colorful flowers to accent those greens. Palm trees, Hibiscus flowers, exotic-looking birds, glittering turquoise ocean waves and the brisk winds associated with this part of Florida all became readily available to us as we settled into our winter home.
On a walk around a local pond, we were thrilled to see this heron standing pretty close to the observation platform located on the trail we had chosen. Binoculars and a telephoto lens meant we could see details of his appearance that we may have missed otherwise. The heron did not seem to be in a hurry to go anywhere. It stood there long after our own interests had lagged, long after we set the camera and binoculars aside and continued our walk.
Other interesting sights caught our attention as we made our way along the trail. More birds, though none let us get as good a view as our heron friend. We saw several varieties of palm trees as well. We Northerners remarked that we didn't realize just how many different kinds of palm trees there were. Some have smooth trunks while others have a remarkably intricate pattern created by their interwoven fronds. Mosses and air plants, properly called Tillandsia, of which I learned there are 650 species world-wide, hung from branches that stretched over the pathways. It felt good to walk at a slow pace, which allowed us to notice things that we might otherwise have missed.
I was ahead of our group, poking through the branches to get closer to the pond, when I caught sight of something swimming in the water way across on the other side, pretty near our friend the heron. All of a sudden the heron moved and the next thing I saw was a long snake caught in his bill. I called Gary and the others over to see, passing the binoculars around and focusing my camera to capture the amazing story unfolding in front of us.
Gary had a hard time watching for very long. His sympathies were stretched, including both the heron and the snake. Intellectually we know that the cycle of life exists, and that life for some means death for other creatures, but it is difficult to see this play out right in front of our eyes. There is so much beauty around us, but some of this beauty is at the expense of other aspects of nature. I suppose it is good that we saw this struggle, even though it was not easy to see, because it reminds us of our indebtedness to the rest of the world for the simple gift of being alive.
Matthew Fox, theologian and author, speaking about this almost thirty years ago used the example of an orange he ate for breakfast to make a point. He said that whatever we consume becomes a part of us, so when we eat an orange we should become juicy like the orange, and offer our own juiciness to the world. In this way we pay tribute to everything that nourishes us, and recognize that we are simply part of the circle of life.
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