Category Photography

Easy breezy bird play

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Sandpiper Happy Hour

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Crabbin’

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Going, going, almost gone…

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We are born into a particular place to particular people, absorbing the world we find and then habituating to its rhythms and requirements. The routine of being cared for intimately in a state of comfort and stability is our natural desire and need; children cannot thrive without it.

That said, human beings grow to become curious, adventurous and mobile creatures, often, though not in every case, ranging far from our original habitats in voluntary pursuit of economic betterment and new experience.

There is an involuntary shadow side to our mobility, however. Sometimes, life confronts us with forced relocation when famine, political upheaval or war (those three are often related) give us little choice but to leave our nests and strike out, in desperate circumstances, for the great unknown.

When this involves great swaths of a population, it merits the biblical term “diaspora.” (Deuteronomy 28:25, from ...

There were times this past year when it seemed, well, it still seems, I must admit, that the world took a step or two backwards on this jagged evolutionary trail we have been traversing over the eons. And thus the tale seems to go, our better angels not yet prevailing all the time, still subject to all the old familiars—fear, greed, avarice, anger—and all the resultant wars, famines and heads-in-the-sand that keep us, if nothing else, the most exasperating/interesting species ever to bestride this earth.

But: it is surely true, too, as evidenced by the legions of people every single one of us knows and observes in such abundance, that our better angels prevail more often than not.

That fact accounts for quite a lot of something in my book. I hope it does in yours, too.

Meanwhile, we have art, among the most intense and tireless expressions of human love we have ever devised...

Short of being completely disabled or extremely young or elderly, we must work. From the lowliest worm to the sparrow to kings and queens, we have to get after our daily labor.

In one form or other, directly or indirectly, we bring the vegetables in from the fields, the meat from the plain, the water from the river, going about our appointed tasks to keep ourselves fed and hydrated.

Call it Darwin’s first imperative: Do what we must to get food and liquid down our gullets and survive for another day.

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Farmer Taking Banana Crop to Market, Uganda, by Robert Muckley

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Here in the West, we often conflate work with life itself—as our passion, our very identity. And we do so with a not-always-clear demarcation between it and the other forces of family, romance, leisure, and recreation that make competing claims on human time and energy (in civilized places, that is, like Canada, or Europe…).

Or we apply t...

“Aren’t two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them falls to the ground apart from your Father’s will. Even all the hairs on your head are numbered.”

That’s the gospel of Matthew, verses 29-30, positing a benevolent and merciful God who cares for and directs the lives of his creatures and creation down to the very last detail.

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And in this corner, Tennyson’s “Nature, red in tooth and claw,” his famous poetic line denoting the unblinking savagery with which creatures stalk, tear into and consume other creatures for their own sustenance.

Which vision reflects reality, once we set down our books and toys, cast off our fanciful cloaks, and head out from our cloistered drawing rooms to confront the challenges of day-to-day survival?

This question is perhaps particularly relevant to the carnivores among us, who rely on slaughterhouses to go about the business that lesser animals must tend...