Signs

Pictures taken from the net (definitely not mine).

Here you are one moment, living the sub-urban life, increasingly becoming the center of your world, and making Godzillas out of the geckos of everyday existence. And the next moment, Nature grabs you by the balls and shows you something so majestic, so unabashedly glorious that you can't help but revel in the understanding that you are just a tiny smidgen of Nature itself, no less beautiful, no less scintillating.

Driving to work a couple of days ago, NPR fighting for oblivion in the rest of the habitual morning noise, we swung onto US 682 where it hugs the Hocking river, and shoots off a driveway to the allegedly haunted Ridges, where I earn my keep. Before we could take that turn, however, a huge bird alighted on the fence. It was definitely larger than the ubiquitous turkey vulture. We drove past, missed our turn, turned around and drove back. Oblivious to the rush of the morning traffic, not a mile from the town's busiest thoroughfare, feathers glinting in the morning sun, there it was: a glorious golden eagle. Its cursory glance at our passing vehicle held all the dignity of aeons of perfection. All noise seemed to go silent. It was timeless.

Then it happened again, this morning. Going about our everyday scramble to decide what to have for breakfast, what to take for lunch - our overarching issues of the day, we were accustomed to seeing our lanlady's five canine companions potter around the front yard and litter by our window. But as I looked out today, I froze, only to breathlessly whisper to my wife to come see. The yard had emptied, the frigid temperature and frosted ground dissuading the dogs from staying out too long.
And right in the middle of the yard, still as any of the garden ornaments, but oozing life from every sinew, stood a magnificent six-point buck. Proud head raised, broad shoulders poised to spring, it listened to maybe the dogs barking from indoors. I had a brief vision of our neighbors (who had a dead deer hanging on the back of their house for weeks last year) coming out and blowing its head off, but it faded soon. Then, as though realizing how pathetic the little chihuahuas really were, it turned around and walked lazily to the three-foot high fence that surrounds the yard. It stopped when its forelegs were almost touching it, as if it had just noticed the fence's existence. I was wondering if it had to pace back in order to jump, when it raised its forelegs and cleared the fence with such fluidity and effortlessness that I burst out laughing. It sauntered down our driveway and back into the woods whence it had come. Again, total silence.

These moments seem to be Nature's way of laughing at us. Our little fences, our little vehicles, all our ruses to get around our little two-legged nakedness, and if we can't dominate, we pull out a gun (or bomb) and kill whatever (or whoever) does something better (or differently). But in such moments, we are the proverbial "deer-in-headlights", where we stand, in all our nakedness, shocked at the self-sufficiency of a being that is a perfect part of its ecology, awed by the prospect that we still have the choice to follow that path, scared by the very fences that we have built in our way, deafened by the very silence we have disowned.