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Wednesday, September 10, 2014

The Sounds of Nature

They say that simply hearing natural ambient sounds, the wind in the trees, soft repetitive birdsong, the chirping of crickets, can help our bodies reenergize and heal themselves. Bow spends a lot of time immersed in the sounds of nature.

He relaxes outside on his bench, and because we are surrounded by open fields, woods and a pasture that has been left wild, there are natural sounds in all directions.

After lunch, every day I go for a walk. Yesterdsay, here is what I saw when I looked to the north.

The neighbors' cows were grazing peacefully in the field. Puffy white clouds hung in the azure sky. I went for a walk down the path in our pasture that leads south, and I saw the wild persimmons ripening.

Nobody planted them. They just grew there themselves. Some conservationists say "plant a tree." They imply that nature is like an underprivileged child, and it needs our charity. But nature is rich with its own wealth. I say: "Get out of the way, stop interfering, and the trees will plant themselves."

There is a great bounty to be had, if only we would get out of the way, make ourselves scarce and appear only in small numbers. My five acres of pasture in a natural state might not be enough to feed Bow, but five thousand acres just might do the trick!

I stopped for a moment to watch a bumblebee harvest nectar on a thistle flower. Somebody keeps telling me that the thistle is a noxious weed that needs to be eradicated. But the bumblebee did not seem to think so. It was doing its very best, hanging on despite the wind, trying to get as much as it could before the weather changed.

By evening, the skies had turned grey over the woods to the east. The wind moved the branches to and fro and dry leaves came tumbling to ground, occasionally seeming to stop for a moment in midair, as the wind changed.

Whenever I get back from my walks out of doors, I share the pictures and videos that I shot with Bow. He saw the bumble bee on the flower yesterday and suggested that I trim the video, because it ran too long. But then he fumbled with the iPhone and showed me what he really wanted.

The thing that Bow most enjoys about the iPhone is not watching nature videos -- it's taking selfies. And so I humor him.

Someday, I want Bow to be able to go on those walks with me again. That would require building a force field or at least a moat around the pasture. But the purpose is not to "liberate" Bow from an unhappy "captivity". It is just to expand his domain!


  1. After the fires up in the mountains nature is reclaiming itself, and trees and bushes are popping up left and right. I have a funny question, I was wondering does Bow like to brush his teeth. I think a post on his dental routines would be interesting.

    1. Hi, Julia. It is nice to know that nature is being allowed to reclaim itself up in the mountains near where you live.

      Bow is not that crazy about dental hygiene but he does love to admire his teeth in a mirror or on a camera screen!

  2. Funny you should say that about letting nature take care of itself re planting. It seems like *everything* I have planted (rose bushes, dogwood trees) dies, but what the birds plant (mulberry seeds in poop) takes off like gangbusters. Case in point: my enormous, three-trunked mulberry tree grew from a seedling that I didn't remove from the back of my back porch. This tree now takes up a large space and covers most of the backyard with its branches. This happened in only 25 years, I do not know why the volunteer seedlings thrive while the ones I plant do not. It's a mystery.

    1. Hi, Pam, your experiences with volunteer seedlings as opposed to things we intentionally plant are the same as mine. I don't think it's necessarily that every volunteer seedling thrives, so much as that we notice those that do, and ultimately they are the only ones that matter. Nature does not care how many fall by the wayside, as long as enough seeds find fertile ground to keep the line going. But when we invest our time and money and sweat and tears into a plant, we notice that it dies. And usually it was a transplant rather than something that sprouted in loco, so it had much less of chance to take root than a seed.