Memories

We hit King John’s Castle in Limerick in the last few days of the Ireland visit and with Inna willing to play the role in costume, we pulled together a black and white shoot that suited the surrounds.

The castle has been at the heart of Limerick City since 1210 and it would have been wrong to shoot in the region without paying some kind of tribute to such an iconic remnant of the past.

We opted to try for a period shoot and the folk at the castle were kind enough to allow us to do so. We managed to ghost some and stage others but at the end of the day ended up with a lovely mix that we will likely remember for a long time.

I have added just three at the end of this blog; hope you enjoy!

Other than some fun pics with Erin down the Mill Road, this turned out to be the last shoot of my visit and concluded some wonderful memories for me of my time there.

This is what led to me thinking about the whole importance of memories as a concept for this blog.

You see, there is no full time recording of our lives that goes on as we move from birth to death. There is no written book that chronicles all that happens us in some Orwellian manner that we can recall.

Our view of life is generally formed on the back of the memories that we have built for ourselves and the experiences that these memories bring.

Some of these memories are good and others not so but the fillers between them tend to get lost in the story of our lives. Mundane doesn’t make it into our memory banks and if our lives finally do flash before our eyes before we go, we won’t be recalling that day we spent in the office working on some Word document seven years ago.

Nor will the people around us that carry us forward in their hearts. They likely will remember something we did with them and in the retelling of who we were to others, will probably skip over that document we were working on, if they even know about it.

So, while certain mundane shit might seem important at a given moment in time, it is more important to keep our lives in perspective. We need to be aware of falling into a pattern of making no new memories or of leaving others with no real memories of us.

The story of our lives is simply a collection of these memories and while some write books that are captivating and filled with love and adventure, others seem to settle for a story that will gather dust on a forgotten shelf in a forgotten library.

Each day that we wake up, life presents us with an opportunity to create a memory. A memory for ourselves or for those around us. If we spend that day in bed or dozing on a couch in front of the TV, then we have scorned that chance to advance our life story even a fraction.

This is one of the reasons I love photography. My camera and I have become best friends since I first picked it up years ago to create pictures for my Dad. What originally was simply an attempt to help fashion images for the man I loved most in the world, turned out to be a life-altering way of creating memories for myself and those I am fortunate enough to share a life with.

I guess what I am trying to say is that whatever your own equivalent to the camera is, grab hold of it today and go somewhere and make a memory. Better yet, take someone you love with you and make one for them while you are at it!

… just a thought.

Isolation

The weather was rather spectacular last week in Ireland and trust me when I say that those words are rarely said in truth.

It is one of the things I love most about living in Florida … the fact that we get so much sunshine and blue skies to play with.

Inna and I took a couple of drives south of Limerick and on the first one, I got lost and we ended up in Ballybunnion of all places. I would never intentionally go to Ballybunnion but sometimes we all end up where the road takes us.

It gave me the chance for some images, I guess and the first two at the end of the blog are of the beach there.

The rest of the images are from the day after that when we drove down to Dingle and took the coast road out the pensinsula. To say it was stunning would be a real understatement and each bend on the road seemed to bring better and better views of the wild Atlantic coastline.

We had a fantastic time and on a good day like this, I honestly can’t imagine a better place to be. We drove all the way out to Slea Head and had a wonderful view of the Blasket Islands just off the coast there.

Though you could see a small few buildings on the bigger island, no one has lived there since 1953 when the Irish government relocated the final few people onto the mainland.

On a day like this I can’t imagine why anyone would want to leave such a place but apparently in winter the weather could be so bad that the islanders were cut off from the mainland for periods of three weeks at a time. Add to that the fact that there is no electricity on the island and I guess it all makes sense.

In any event, there are a number of images taken along the drive out the peninsula at the end of the blog. Hope you enjoy.

The thought for the blog today actually came from the search for isolation that many of us crave at times.

I know that I, for one, have wished many times to just be able to escape to an island and shut out the world.

This need to escape is often something that we wish for when we are feeling overwhelmed with bad shit happening.

Yet isn’t it strange that we don’t wish for help with the shit, but rather to escape away from it?

I think when people are surrounded by a good support structure, they get help offloading some of life’s upsets and challenges. It is only when we are carrying the burden on our own that we look to escape as we don’t even know who to call for help.

Therein lies a big problem. There was a time when things weren’t so crazy in our lives and we had parents or maybe an older sibling, that would shield us from much of the turbulence that existed around us.

Though we may reminisce about how things were so much simpler in those days and wish we were able to get back there, it likely wasn’t real. It was just that we were shielded from it.

If you grow old enough, you become an orphan. It is the way of life, unfortunately. And apart from now taking on issues that are causing problems for those you love, your own issues tend to fall firmly on your own shoulders.

That is where the feeling of being overwhelmed comes from along with the despairing feeling of wishing to escape to an island.

The good news is that what you are feeling is completely understandable. The bad news is, escape is a fallacy and you just have to put on your big-girl-panties and get through it.

Because at the end of the day, getting through issues of our own and helping those you love with theirs, eventually transforms you into your parents. Some of us would welcome that comparison but whether or not you had awesome parents like mine, at the very least dealing with this shit makes a better person of you.

You become the problem solver, the fixer, the person people go to when all else fails.

Don’t you wish you had someone like that in your life?

Well you do and worse case scenario it is yourself. Embrace difficulty and it becomes easier. Run away from it and it will always be the monster in your closet.

… just a thought!

Childhood Dreams

When I was a young boy, growing up in Limerick, I held the world in typical childish wonder.

A six or seven mile ride on the bicycle took me out to an old ruins called Carraig Ui gConnaill and took me back in time a thousand years.

So, last week, finding myself back in Ireland, Inna and I found ourselves back out at the same old ruins and my boyhood memories came rushing back in.

I hadn’t forgotten anything physical of the place; in fact I have used the ruins in a chapter of my book and they are exactly as I have remembered them to be.

But what I did forget was the feeling … the absolute awe as you stand there locked amongst crumbly old walls that have seen over a thousand years of people like me standing in its courtyard.

Though these ruins are about a thousand years old, there were buildings before then that occupied that same vantage point with a view that stretches out for miles and miles in all direction. By all accounts, this rock (that’s what the word Carraig means) was home to prior settlements as far back as 1,000 BC

Typically Ireland, these ruins are not maintained and a country so rich in ancient heritage seems happy to let yet another piece of its history get overgrown and derelict.

The approach to the ruins from the north face (with your back to the river Shannon) was particularly daunting and we failed to scale its height. We could only imagine what a wonderful defense it had from invaders making that approach.

So, we drove around to the south side and found a road that warned off would-be visitors with threatening “private road” signs that made us feel more than unwelcome.

But it was worth taking the chance of confrontation and soon we found ourselves inside the old courtyard and exploring the crumbling structure that remained.

I took a number of shots (attached a few here at the end of the blog) of some of the remaining building and an upward view within what used to be a tower with spiral staircase. There is also a shot of the view from the north wall towards the distant Shannon River. I hope you enjoy.

The visit left me with so many thoughts. I reminisced that my Mam and Dad used to cycle out there when they were dating back in the late 1940’s. They told me of some lovely picnics they had out there and it makes me happy to think I was someplace that they were when none of us kids were more than a twinkle in their eyes.

This made me think of the dreams that they might have had at the time and how close to their reality, their lives fully realized. Whether their dreams were modest or not, their lives played out under the glare of a huge love and from my perspective, at least, it looked to me that they must surely have achieved more in life than they could possibly have imagined.

On the back of a sixty-odd year marriage and living more than half of that in a comfortable and very special home, they exited the world within a few years of each other, a few years back.

So, I tried to recall what my own dreams might have been, as I cycled out to those same ruins a million years ago. Did I imagine a life that would play out the way it has? Did I dream for something bigger or better? Who knows.

Those memories have gone with the winds of time, so I can’t sit here and imagine what I was thinking when I was eleven years old.

I can’t imagine though that any dreams I had left me living out my life here in Florida, or that I would develop so many flaws and shortcomings that made my walk-on-water days of youth, seem an almost comical fancy.

In fact, once of the greatest gifts that time gives us is the ability to see through our own smoke-screen and understand ourselves, our limitations, and our flaws.

Time can be a humbling experience, if we let it. It gives us the breadth of insight on how we have developed; areas that we have grown in and areas that we have failed in.

We don’t have to question our eleven-year-old selves. We only have to look back at a block of time five or ten years past and ask ourselves how we have measured up against what we imagined for ourselves back then.

A common interview question is “where do you see yourself in five years?” and so it is quite realistic to ask that same question of ourselves looking back that same five years.

Where did we see ourselves back then? And are we there yet?

The simple truth is that if we aren’t where we thought we would be five years ago, then there is something wrong. Either we imagined our future incorrectly based on an incorrect view of our prospects, or something happened that has distracted us away from our intended goal.

It is an important knowledge to have of oneself; the knowledge of who we are and where we are heading in life. Without that knowledge we can dramatically overestimate ourselves and end up on our death beds full of remorse at things we didn’t achieve or goals that were left incomplete.

I ask myself repeatedly who I am. Depending on my mood, I will often end up being highly self-critical and while that may sound deprecating, it really isn’t. It is our desire to improve ourselves that oftentimes leads us to our greatest growth.

If we already see ourselves as perfect, then quite frankly, our growth will likely be stunted.

There are those who do see themselves as perfect. You only have to look at the dotard and his cronies in the red politics world. But unless your father gave you millions to run at life with, then that version of self-belief normally leads to a rude awakening for you.

I guess what I am trying to say in this blog is that our dreams are a good thing that can give our course some initial direction. We need to chart that course, with an accurate assessment of who exactly is following this course and in so doing, we will most likely achieve life’s greatest goal.

Happiness.

That is the one thing that we should all live our lives in hope of. If we can find that, then howsoever we do, our goals and our inner selves have been correctly aligned.

… just a thought!

On the grey days

We had a cold front move through earlier today and I could see it coming in yesterday evening when I was planning my day today. Rain was forecast as 100% in the morning and as expected I woke up to thick grey clouds.

I had resolved anyway to head for Circle B no matter what and it looked like I had about a two hour window after sunrise and before the rain came. So, gloomy or not, I grabbed the camera and headed off to one of the trails.

My expectations were absolutely minimal and with many of the creatures bedded down waiting for the front to pass over, the place seemed quite deserted.

The wind was keeping most of the birds out of the sky and the few that were there seemed to be quite subdued in what they were up to.

But here’s the thing … each of these guys brought color into the day just by being there and I appreciate every one of them. If they had all hidden away, I wouldn’t have held it against them so every little creature that I saw was a real bonus.

And boy were there some beautiful little bonuses there for me today. You can see here for yourself some of the guys that braved the grey day. My favorite shots are of the tricolor heron, the lone feather floating on the water, and the amazing little colored bunting.

I had never seen a bunting before and to find him at the very end of my trail was an unexpected splash of color in a genuinely grey day.

I hope you enjoy!

It was that little guy that really got me thinking on today’s topic. You see, it wasn’t that it was a bad day; it wasn’t. It wasn’t that I hadn’t got some nice pics already; I had.

It was that he arrived completely unexpectedly and that if some kind person hadn’t pointed him out to me, I might have totally passed by the bush he was hidden in.

We all have rainy days in our life. We all have sunny days in our life. We may go through periods of sustained rain or long periods of sunshine. But the truth is that much of our lives is played out in grey days.

These are days that are non-descript, uneventful, not bad and not good … just grey days.

For many of us, these days pass by without distinction and they can be a real source of life passing us by, if we let it.

You see, much like the bunting, there is almost always a splash of color that we can find in our grey day. It doesn’t have to be a day changer; turning a day on its head.

It just needs to be a moment that we can acknowledge where something is special. For example, you might spot a rainbow, or a little flower in bloom, or a butterfly flits by. These are scarcely moments in and of themselves, but we can stop and breathe them in nonetheless.

Because when we stop and acknowledge something even as “trivial” as the little flower, we absorb its color into our day. We make it a little less grey.

Not all such little moments will be as colorful as the little bunting but they all count.

Have you ever lain in bed at the end of a grey day and wrestled with finding anything of significance that made the day worthwhile? You might convince yourself that you are just tired and need to go to sleep but the truth is that if you have stopped to smell a single flower and dreamed along the fight of a gentle butterfly, then all of a sudden just that tiny part of your day become memorable.

We don’t remember grey days. They fade away into obscurity as soon as they are gone. If there are enough of them, they account for the main reason why people let life pass them by. Suddenly waking out of a sleep to realize that the years are slipping by at an alarming rate.

But the moment we inject a little color into one, we add a memory that slows down the passage of time and makes each day a more valuable part of our life experience.

While we don’t know how many days we get on this planet, a good rule of thumb is to make as many of them as memorable as possible. Even if for nothing else than a tiny splash of color we added into one that was otherwise fading into grey.

… just a thought.

Normal Life

I have been silent, at least blog-wise, for the past few weeks. It has been a time-filled, chaotic, period interspersed with periods of normality that have allowed me to catch a breath.

During that time, the only real shots I have taken is of the life around me here at the creek. But I plan to visit a trail tomorrow and thought that I should put a quick note here with images from this time away, rather than just lose them in a file folder on my PC.

My five office cats are all here, along with TC (the little guy with the milk-beard) but Tetsuo and he-who-is-as-yet-unnamed, aren’t.

I also have a few shots of Woody at the very end, who seems to be hanging around here recently banging his head off some of the trees in my yard.

Anyway, hope you enjoy.

So, I guess that brings the cat-contingent here at home to twelve.

I guess one might say that I have a liking for cats. But I never imagined that I would end up the old catman that I have become.

And this has really made me pause to think about “normal” life and what it means to each of us.

The whole Trump era, the pandemic, and now this criminal war in Ukraine, seems to have really taken us all away from whatever we once considered normal and frankly I doubt if we will ever get back there.

Trump has created a new level of lying and deceit that will live on long after he is rotting in a coffin somewhere. The pandemic has altered daily life to a level that it will never return to pre-pandemic levels. And Putin has shown that true evil not only exists in the world but it has the support of the willfully ignorant.

So, how could normal ever return after all that?

And that raises the other question, which is “What is normal anyway?”

You see, my version of normal is not just different from most other people I know, but it is also different from what I considered normal some years ago.

And if I am correct, that means that most of you reading this will have also experienced several changes in your lives that redefined what normal is for you too.

You might therefore arrive at the conclusion that normal is a moving target. But truthfully, I would suggest that normal doesn’t exist.

It never did and it never will.

It is a figment of our imagination and something that we wish for when something in our lives is not going well.

It has become the fountain of youth of our generations. Something to wish for but never to attain.

More often than not, when we are in unhappy times, we search backwards in our memories to a time we were happy and we wish ourselves back there.

But was there ever really a “there” or is it just something that we have reshaped into a happier moment than where we are?

This aching for a better time is why some pathetic dotard can popularize a catch phrase like “Make America Great Again” and all the idiots buy the red hats in support and preach about taking us back to a better time.

But who exactly was this America great for? Are the black republicans really imagining the same great time in the past as the ignorant rednecks? Do they really want to sit in the back of a bus again?

And it is easy to pick on the morons, I know. But this issue is a lot bigger than just the red politics. It’s bigger than the commie bastards that want to pull a new curtain across Europe.

The real problem is so embedded into life for all of us that it creates a veil of unhappiness across our very existence. Individually it creates a real level of dissatisfaction in our lives that steals the joy from our achievements and undermines any sense of good in our status quo.

It runs rife through groups; political, religious, social, or whatever. Uniting them in a common cause of dissatisfaction where they collectively push for something. For example look how overactive these gun nuts are … they aren’t happy with having a handgun or two. They need assault rifles, bazookas, and other weapons of mass destruction because somehow that makes them think these might take them back to a time they were happy with the size of their dicks.

Dissatisfaction is a cruel master. By it’s very nature, it can never be satisfied. We might think once we invade Crimea we will be happy, but no. We also need Ukraine.

If we could develop a level of satisfaction with where we are instead of always wishing we were somewhere else, our sense of normal would return.

When we aim for a normal that never existed, it can never be reached. And therein lies the problem.

… just a thought.

Good Intentions

I set out a few days ago to make the most of another gorgeous Florida day. The skies were clear and blue and I had a crack in my schedule that allowed me to make the most of it.

It has been a challenging time of late and finding time for things I love to do has been a bit of an issue, to put it mildly.

So heading down to Circle B and hitting a trail down by Lake Hancock, reacquainted me with myself as much as with the sights and creatures that abound there.

I took the big gun (the 600 mm lens) and even though I didn’t use the tripod, I managed to control it enough to get some decent shots.

I’ve added them here at the end of the blog along with a picture of Coco who was just relaxing in a gravy lovers tray when I got back and a first shot of TC … he is the newest visitor to come by for food. That makes eleven cats at my place (in case you’re counting).

Anyway, hope you enjoy!

So, it was a day or so later, when I found myself trying to help a little moth that had been chased by the cats, that today’s thought first occurred to me.

The little guy had been chased indoors and had taken a few paw swipes by the time I got to him. But, I picked him up and brought him outside to the evening air and put him on the railing just outside the front door.

He was walking but a bit unsteady, so I looked up online what to feed a moth and the answer was mostly liquid, with high sugar content. Being a bad eater, I had no fruit at the house but I did have syrup. (You can tell I like pancakes by my waistline.)

To cut a long story short, I poured a couple teaspoons of it onto a small piece of plastic and then helped him near it so he could have a drink.

But the poor little guy walked into it and almost drowned in the syrup. I managed to get him back out but now he had a real coating of the stuff all over him as he walked away.

I went back in home defeated and tried to console myself that I had good intentions. But sometimes, despite the best of intentions we not only fail … we can make matters worse.

I love living creatures. Try my very best to kill no-one and if I come across an injured creature, I will extend myself to try to help.

But sometimes, life doesn’t want our help and in this case (as Morgan put it so eloquently) I IHOP-ed the poor guy up nicely for someone out looking for a maple-flavored snack.

Our intentions will often fall apart in circumstances where we try to have a positive impact. For example, how often have you heard of someone trying to break up a fight only to be shot or stabbed?

I know that is a rather dramatic example, but it does happen. And we have to be ready for it.

Because inside our heads we search for things we can affect. Perhaps even control. We think that if we put the right effort in, then the right result will happen.

Unfortunately that isn’t true and life has a way of reminding us of our own triviality in how life plays out.

So much of life weaves its way without our intervention and while it finds a path that may not be one we would choose, we are really quite irrelevant to the end result.

Yes, there are definitely times when we can have a positive impact on things around us but sometimes we just can’t.

Our inability to create our preferred result should not deter us from trying. It is the trying that occasionally brings small victories our way or a better life to those around us. Without such efforts life would devolve into an uncaring passage of time that goes from start to finish in a straight line.

We can and do alter the course of things around us. When we alter the course of an animal’s life in a positive manner, we elevate our own in the process. Our purpose for having existed in the first place is validated and if done so unselfishly, then all the better!

But just as in my maple-flavored moth experience, sometimes we just miss. We can revisit it in our heads and second guess other things we could have done, but at the end of the day we have to recognize that we are not gods.

We do not roll the dice and yet we must follow how they roll.

… just a thought!

Conflicted Interests

Just like the day before with the the birds at feeding time, I brought the camera out again yesterday to see what little feathered friends might be helping themselves to my offerings.

But this times the birds that were around were mostly staying in the trees and bushes because several of the cats were patrolling the area. In fact Everest and Lincoln were more stalking than patrolling; Everest in the tree above and Lincoln hiding by a bush below, one leap away from where the bread had been thrown.

Even Coco who is more the pacifist than anything else, was engaged in stealthy patrol and his occasional lip-licking must have given second thoughts to many of the feathered folk.

I’ve done my best to keep the cats away from the buffet area but for weeks now they have a penchant for letting the birds know who is boss in these neck of the woods.

As much as I love birds, this is one of the problems with having ten cats sharing residence with me. They may be loving and affectionate to me but their natural predator instincts have seen the demise of many a lizard, frog, vole, mouse, rat, and even a couple of birds.

I have rescued many from the jaws of death, but for every one I have saved, there are several I have failed to.

I love cats. I find them wildly intelligent, very independent, and seriously expressive. The same little lady that gives me huge doe-eyes of affection can in a moment produce a squint-stare of death when something smaller than me crosses their path.

Anyway, I have attached several of the pics from yesterday here at the end of the blog. Even one of the half moon that hung in the afternoon skies, observing all beneath it.

Hope you enjoy!

So, it was really the whole notion of conflicted interest that wrestled with my thoughts and gave me the topic for today’s blog.

I go out of my way to save all life … everything from spiders up to raccoons. Life here has given me many opportunities to help across that full range and I am really fortunate to having been able to.

But I am also aware that life’s circle involves death-giving-life and that at best any saving I do, is merely a temporary change of fortune for whoever the beneficiary is. And when I help one today, he may be killing another tomorrow.

It is a challenging thought and it puts me at odds with the majority of the community of nature photographers. Those who don’t interfere and continue to take the shot operate to different guidelines than me. If I can help, I do.

I don’t even have a convincing argument as to why my approach might be better. But that doesn’t stop me.

When we got overrun with rats a couple of years back and getting rid of them became a final option, I still went ahead and rescued over twenty of them and rehomed them away from residential setting. One little guy even bit me and drew blood but I still continued to carry him to safety.

I think it comes down in my head to every living creature having a right to life.

(Don’t try to extend that argument to a fetus with no ability to survive on its own by the way. That’s bullshit)

But while we like to think of human lives as the most important and some lives being more important than others, I strongly disagree. The least of worms deserves to be picked up and moved to somewhere where he has a chance to live.

The choice of who lives and dies should not be up to us.

Though we have designated several species of life to be consumable (cows, chickens, pigs, etc.) this is a highly immoral and flawed choice. When we make it, we assume infallibility and yet scream blue murder when other make the same infallible choice that consumes whales, dogs, and monkeys.

There is no moral choice here, no matter how we try to convince ourselves otherwise. We choose to slaughter and consume, not out of necessity, but out of want. Call it a food chain, or culling, or medical testing, it is still murder.

I am not vegetarian but have dramatically reduced my meat intake. And it bothers me that the rest of the world has gone in the opposite direction. We consume more meat now per person than ever before in the history of mankind.

And most of this consumption occurs in the sanitized factory food-chain environment so that we don’t even have to think about what poor creature had to die just so that we could eat that nugget, or burger, or sausage.

Don’t get me started on what this preoccupation with “meat production” is doing to the environment. Suffice to say that almost 20% of all greenhouse gasses are caused by the agriculture/meat industry … that isn’t far off twice the percentage caused by all transportation (13%).

There are many choices we make that have a degree of conflict of interest in the decision. Most are simply made based on a justification of what we want to do, regardless of the impact.

If all of us could just constrain our wants a little and reduce our willingness to kill just a tad … we would certainly upset billion dollar industries, but we might actually end up saving a planet.

… just a thought.

For the Birds

Putting out food for Possums and Raccoons each evening, has become part of my daily routine and the knowledge that I am making a meal available to some poor misfortunes is part of my running feel-good factor.

The same five dishes have gone out for the last few years and touch wood, I haven’t missed a single serving regardless of weather or other commitments.

So, by this time, they are used to my routine and if I am late, I begin to get some gentle reminders from them that they are waiting for me. Of course, along with the main course for those guys is four slices of bread neatly cut into squares and tossed near the bushes and trees for the birds. And somehow the word has passed from generation to generation and my arrival with the tray of delectables is greeted by a chorus of chirps and tweets.

I get some slight variation as each season goes by but mostly I am greeted by the same happy little faces and the moment the bread hits the ground, they swoop in and collect some nourishment.

They brave the cats and I try to shoo my kitties away. But in truth, these birds have to have their wits about them and only land for a second or two.

So, getting a few pics yesterday and today was a fun part of the process and I have added a selection at the end of the blog. Yesterday’s shots were only of a few wrens as I was too slow to catch the others. But today’s images caught the earlier arrivals (Cardinals, Blue Jays, and some I still need to look up to identify.

Anyway, hope you enjoy!

It was really this evening as I spoke to the cats and told them that the bread was for the birds, that the thought of this blog really took shape.

You see, if you look up the phrase “for the birds” you will see it is an American phrase that describes something as being meaningless, drivel, irrelevant.

We have over the years belittled many creatures with simple association of demeaning phrases and it reflects on our disregard for all who aren’t human. We will call someone a dirty rat, a snake in the grass, a filthy pig, or a blood-sucking leech.

Such metaphors conjure up imagery that most listeners attach negativity to and the target of the slur is appropriately vilified.

Broader terms such as calling someone a fucking animal is also a “good hit” that seeks to degrade the target in the mind of the listener.

While it is obvious that the speaker of such slurs is demeaning the intended target, what of the poor animals that are being used to fashion the slur?

Why do we think it is ok to take two of the most intelligent animals on the planet (rats and pigs) and define them simply as an item of derision?

And on the topic of the general-term metaphor, why do we allow the word animal to be used as an attack phrase? Why do we accept it as a demeaning slur?

If we think we are on solid ground implying that an animal is somehow “sub-human”, I would argue that most of our race is sub-animal. We exhibit traits that frankly most animals wouldn’t be caught dead doing.

For example look at the Seven Deadly Sins and ask yourself what animal you could paint with Pride, Greed, Lust, Envy, Gluttony, Wrath, and Sloth?

Frankly the only animal that I can think of that could be described in such a fashion is human.

Like it or not, humans are animals. We may have evolved in a different way from others but that doesn’t mean superiority.

I am not even sure we would know what superiority actually is, if it hit us in the face. We can isolate certain characteristics such as communication superiority or military superiority or such but if you don’t see our inferiority in over-colonization, destruction, and climate impact, then you are missing the bigger picture.

Humans are in many ways parasitic on the planet that we have colonized. We live off the planet’s resources but use them at a far greater rate than we replenish.

I am not sure what good we do for this planet, but I sure as hell could talk for an hour on the bad we do to it.

Look at the greater ecosystem of which birds and bees are a part of, for example. Now imagine what would happen to the planet if both were to disappear overnight.

Simply put, the planet would collapse and the world would simply die.

Now imagine what would happen to the planet if humans were to disappear overnight.

Simply put, the planet would flourish.

What does that tell you? I know what it says to me and frankly boasting of human superiority rings very hollow in the halls of truth.

I am not sure what animals actually fall into the category of sub-human … perhaps it is time to examine a list of other parasites like fleas, lice, and tapeworms.

The Oxford Dictionary explains the word “parasite” as “an organism that lives in or on an organism of another species (its host) and benefits by deriving nutrients at the other’s expense.”

Doesn’t that sound awfully familiar?

Can’t you just imagine an argument that takes place between two higher-order creatures, where one delivers the ultimate put down to the other. “Quit behaving like a fucking human.”

… just a thought.

Frigid

This weekend, the whole east of the US is gripped in a strong cold front; the Northeast is submerged in severe winter storm and under tons of snow. Meanwhile here in Florida, temperatures have plummeted to overnight freezing and we are struggling with what we consider freezing temperatures.

I guess it is all relative. I have tried explaining how cold we are to people in tougher climes and I get no sympathy when I moan about cold hands and nose.

But when the weather hits freezing, even if it is just a day or two of the year, all talk turns to the weather. It becomes a dominant issue in conversations and it alters how we go about our day.

Yesterday morning, I decided to brave the cold and head to Circle B and wander down a trail. Being this cold (temp was somewhere in the 40s) I knew two things; firstly there would be blue skies overhead from the clear skies, and secondly there would be very few people there.


And I was right on both counts.

It was perfect for photographs with the bright blue skies and there were so many times when I was on a section of the trail without a single person anywhere in sight. It was truly idyllic.

It turned out to be a day for the birds … alligators were nowhere to be found as they sought deeper and warmer waters.

Great Blue Herons abounded and they present a good target for a camera. They move slowly and stay perfectly still while stalking their prey. And their size makes them easy to spot from a distance.

Less easy but nonetheless wonderful to try photographing were some of the small birds that flitted in and out of trees and bushes. I got some beauties and they are at the end of the blog. Hope you enjoy!

As I drove away and when feeling began to return to my lower extremities, I began to think over how we elevate certain things to importance only when they change to a point of being unusual.

For example, here in Florida on a typically warm, blue sky day, nobody even mentions how glorious the weather almost always is here in the sunshine state. Drop the temperature to where we have to wear a jacket and all of a sudden it becomes a common topic of conversation.

You see, us humans have an innate ability to take good things for granted. We only give attention to something that isn’t quite right for us and ignore all the wonderful gifts in our everyday life.

For example how much consideration do you normally give to the fact that we humans are not part of the normal food chain any more? We are one of the few species that don’t have to worry about that.

Yes, we find a myriad of ways to kill and mutilate ourselves, but being eaten by a higher order predator is not normally part of our existence.

Now imagine being a fish. Every day someone is trying to catch and eat you. This elevates your daily survival right up there along with finding something to eat so that you don’t starve … which is another thing that most of us humans don’t have to worry about. Unless you are unfortunate enough to live in a famine-level area, starvation isn’t likely to top your attention span for very long.

Close observation of the natural world gives great insight into some the material aspects of what we humans take for granted and it extends into other immediate areas (like having a home and a family and friends) very quickly when you begin to look at the lives of those little creatures all around us.

But what isn’t so immediately apparent in that environment is also the number of emotional or mental aspects of life that we take for granted. Like, how can you tell if a bird is happy? And do they experience hope and anticipation? Do they experience love? The answer is likely yes to most of those questions, but without the expressive face and the ability to shed tears, laugh, or moan, their experience is invisible to us.

So when we live in a state of happiness, contentment, or even just normality, we only notice when one or more of those states alter and we have to deal with a change. Otherwise, we rarely acknowledge when things are good. Although yesterday in passing by a photographer who was heading in the opposite direction, I did comment to him how this was such a perfect “happy to be alive” moment and he acknowledged the same.

And I guess, that is my point … it is important to acknowledge when we are having a good day. To acknowledge that we have some food in our belly, a place to rest our head and even (occasionally) that we are no longer part of the food chain.

We should also acknowledge that someone loves us, that we are fortunate enough to share moments with friends, and that we are enjoying ourselves, even if just for the moment.

To not do so, not only reduces our own life experience but it belittles those that are not as fortunate as we are. And make no mistake about it … we are indeed fortunate.

… just a thought!

    Back in the day

    Last week, we had the chance to visit one of my favorite spots in Ireland; the stone circle at Grange and the nearby Lough Gur settlement.

    For those of you unfamiliar with the area, Lough Gur was archaeologically surveyed and found to have evidence of settlement for 6,000 years. And the stone circle itself is now 4,100 years old and the entrance to it along with two other partial circles in neighboring fields forms a perfect isosceles triangle.

    The circle is 50 yards in diameter and as such is the largest circle known in Europe.

    So, the feeling is not just that you are standing in a pretty place but that you have entered a place in time … a place of reverence, with connection to the deities and the stars.

    I have added a few images from this visit at the end of the blog. Hope you enjoy.

    Whenever I visit Ireland, I like to go visit. It is a very simple and uncommercialized spot and there in the natural surrounds it is very easy to let your mind drift back in time as you think of those that have been there before you and the life and times that played out there over the years.

    It can be a very humbling exercise and one that makes you come to grips with your own insignificance and brevity of life.

    And that is how the thought for today’s blog evolved in my head. How we can become so consumed with our own importance and self-worth, that we fail to see the bigger picture.

    My lifetime, whenever it comes to an end, will be merely the smallest speck in the timeline of the world I live in. Unless I do something catastrophic that causes the earth to collide with the moon, my own existence will be completely lost as the world continues to turn.

    To people that think the world revolves around them, that is a very difficult notion to accept and I pity them for their lack of understanding. No individual is important beyond a momentary spark of interest in the timeline of human existence.

    And the entire human existence itself is only a speck in the timeline of this planet; barely noticeable as you examine the length of time this planet has existed. You see, humans have been on this planet for approximately 300,000 years and the planet itself has been here 4,500,000,000 years.

    Yet there are some that think humanity is god’s gift to the planet and that they are god’s gift to humanity.

    There is no coffee for these people to wake up and smell; there is only the stench of their pathetic selves to greet them and so they stay asleep in their miserable dream.

    Humans created their gods to explain certain things their little brains could not understand and then used their own creation to inflate their own importance. They believe humans were created in gods image, so they see their deity as this elderly Caucasian with a long flowing beard living somewhere up in the clouds and smiling down on his wondrous creation.

    If you want to believe in a god, then go for it. Whatever crutch you need to feel some degree of self-worth is fine with me. But when your creation allows you to justify certain behaviors based on your own highest ranking in creation … that’s where I have the problem.

    You see, the notion that we humans are more important than all other creatures allows certain among us to mistreat, abuse, slaughter, and eradicate many of the other creatures that evolved on this same planet.

    I have seen the callousness and those that perform it are small people; small minded, low intelligence, self-serving, scum.

    Our race has a lot of wonderful people in it. People that are intelligent, humble, appreciative, aware. But there are others who think so highly of themselves that they willingly place themselves and their wants ahead of the very planet that gives them life.

    Yet there was a moment, back in the day, before these books were written that humans coexisted with other creatures without grandiose ideologies that led to abuse.

    Sometimes these creatures ate us and sometimes we ate them. Birds eat worms and one day worms eats birds. Such is the way of life.

    The moment when we started building caskets and tombs to protect our decaying bodies after death, is the first real moment when humans decided that they were not part of the circle of life … but above it.

    But like most of the things we pat ourselves on the back for; it is a false position.

    We exist until we don’t. It’s a simple concept and one that scares only the feeble minded.

    … just a thought.