This is a ‘Disney Song and Dance’ time to be alive. So true. Thing are actually awesome.
It’s a horror show out there.
The female wasp plants her eggs in a caterpillar. In time, the eggs hatch, and her young eat the caterpillar from the inside out.
It’s full on…. For the caterpillar.
Or what about that parasitic worm that preys on insects? It grows to huge proportions in the abdomens of a praying mantis, until finally, as the mantis is driven to water in extreme thirst, the worm bursts from the mantis’s abdomen, back into the water to complete the next stage of it’s life-cycle…
… Leaving the mangled corpse of the mantis rotting at the water’s edge.
When I was growing up, I believed in the Disney version of nature – that everything just existed in a peaceful and overly-musical harmony – that everything just coexisted and got along.
But it’s just not true. They never showed you the footage where the fairy wrens were gobbling up the lady-bugs like popcorn.
Tennyson said that “nature is red in tooth and claw” and this is the truth of it.
So when we look at humanity, it shouldn’t be surprising that cruel and selfish violence can sometimes be part of the human experience. What should be surprising is that somehow it is not the dominant human experience.
We have created a world with huge pockets of peace, all over the globe. In Australia we have created a society where most people can expect to live their entire lives without suffering any direct violence – where violence is a strange exception to the wide-spread peace that we take for granted.
When we look at the gore-fest that is nature, isn’t this something of a miracle?
Isn’t this something worth celebrating? Something worth banging a drum about?
This is the truth of it. This is a wonderful, miraculous, Disney-song-and-dance time to be alive.
It’s time we started acting like it.
JG