Hey tweets, Here, with my apologies to those who want only birds, is
something from my heart. Please just hit delete if you're looking for "birds
I saw at the Fill today."

When Hurricane Rita struck Beaumont and Sabine Pass last night, what did she
mean by it? Or to put it another way, does nature have meaning?

Rita was kinder than Katrina. She hit hard but not as hard as we feared.
Meteorologists say that Rita weakened because she passed over cooler water
just before making landfall. But who made her do that? Did she do it
herself? Did God? Did God do it through the forces of nature, by way of the
laws of physics? Or was it just happenstance?

To have meaning, you must have a brain because meaning explains the why of
experience. If you don?t have a brain, you don?t need meaning. Stuff just
happens and you react to it this way or that way or no way.

How much of a brain do you need? I suppose that depends on how many layers
of meaning you need to apply.

Certainly meaning is important to birds, at least to some of them. Dennis
Paulson, that great ornithologist and teacher, told the new class of master
birders last week that grebes and loons and other fish-eating birds require
as long as four years to mature. He supposed it was because fishing is a
hard business. If you make your living from it, you need to develop enough
fish-catching skill to reliably catch enough food for yourself and for the
babies who will depend on you. Otherwise, no use breeding.

To develop skill, you have to be able to learn from your mistakes, and from
your successes. You need to be able to assess what works, what doesn?t, and
WHY, so that you can apply the right lessons to future fishing expeditions.
That is the only way to be reliable about catching fish.

So fish-catching birds, and probably mammal-catching birds, and probably
even seed-catching birds, need to be able to make some sense of the world.
They need to apply meaning to it.

We humans need to apply even more meaning to life than do birds. This is
because our natural environment is each other, and people create very
complicated environments. In order to make reliable choices about survival
in our environment, we need to understand how and why complex systems and
even more complex individuals behave the way they do. When a casual friend
says, "Let?s do lunch," we?d better be able to decode the meaning of that
statement or we?ll show up for lunch someday and there won?t be any food or
even any friend.

Maybe a byproduct of this need for meaning in our cultural environment is a
need for meaning in the world at large.

Unfortunately, nature does not have a brain. At the core of the world is a
molten slug of iron, not a thinking, feeling, persuadable brain. Yet
indifferent, unfeeling nature acts upon us. We get attacked by a bacterium
and some of us die, but others don?t, or others don?t get attacked at all.
We trip on a piece of wood and sprain an ankle, or we break a leg. We take
our hard-earned money down to the 7-11 to buy lottery tickets every week and
watch the lotto sucker suck out eight ping-pong balls with numbers on them,
but the numbers aren?t ours. Meanwhile, lazy Joe down the street just won a
pile.

These are very deep mysteries. How can we apply meaning?

For many religious people, the answer is simple. We trust to God. The planet
may not have a brain, but God does, and He directs everything. In many
(though not all) religions, God is good. So something that seems
inexplicably bad to us is really okay because it?s part of God?s plan. We
may not understand it, but that?s why we need faith.

For secular scientists, the answer is also simple. There is no meaning at
all. However, there are laws of physics that everything physical must obey.
So what seems random to us may really not be; we just can?t understand it
yet. Even randomness is not random, in the sense that it has absolutely no
rules. But all this is okay because we?ll get a bigger grant and a bigger
computer someday, and then we?ll understand it much better.

I am comforted by neither of these approaches. I believe in God, but my
faith is too weak to surrender my sense of outrage when things go bad,
especially when the bad things are done by other people. Evil should be
fought and defeated. If it defeats me instead, then I have lost, and there
is no papering over that loss by saying it?s all good. I believe in the laws
of physics, too, but I cannot believe in the essential randomness of life.
Randomness is not meaning. It is an empty vacuum, and that is not rich
enough for me.

In my search for meaning, I turn to nature. Nature, to me, is beauty made
real. And that makes me happy.

"There is no ugly creature," my Aunt Marie told me one day.

"What about mosquitoes?" I asked.

"Even mosquitoes are beautiful," she replied. As I opened my mouth to argue,
she went on, "I don?t like the way they bite and make me itch, but that has
nothing to do with whether they are beautiful. If you look at even a
mosquito closely enough and understand it well enough, you will see its
beauty."

To the ancient Greeks, it was a very short step from beauty to goodness. As
Socrates was wont to ask his somewhat feeble-minded interlocutors, "Is
beauty good or bad? Surely, Dimbulbous, you must see that beauty cannot be
bad. Therefore, it is good."

I can?t go as far as that. After all, I was raised with Barbie dolls, whose
beauty is probably pretty bad for little girls. But I *can* say that the
beauty of nature fills up my soul with happiness.

Are beauty and happiness enough to create meaning? I say no. But nature does
more for me than supply beauty and happiness. Nature inspires me to create
beauty in my own little world of culture.

You see, nature is always beautiful but not always kind. Sometimes nature is
cruel. At the Fill I have seen both, and I have learned from both.

One day, for instance, I watched a pied-billed grebe catch a very large fish
for its young. The fish was too big for the first baby to swallow. The
mother offered it again and again, but the baby couldn?t eat it. So the
mother offered it to her second baby, who also could not eat it. With
unending patience, the mother put the fish into the third baby?s bill. It
could not swallow the fish either. I left as the mother returned the fish to
the first baby, hoping no doubt that something had changed and now the baby
could eat the darned fish.

The pied-billed grebe mom may not have been very smart or skilled, but she
was the epitome of kind. She never lost her temper. She didn?t scream in
frustration. I suppose eventually either the fish got so ragged that it
could be swallowed, or the mom realized she had to catch a smaller fish. The
point is, she didn?t give up and leave. She was going to feed her babies,
and that was that.

I have seen great cruelty at the Fill, too. One time, a relay of crows
harassed a killdeer to exhaustion. Around and around the central prairie
they flew, one crow after another chasing the poor killdeer. Finally, the
killdeer was too tired to fly anymore. It sank to the grass and lay there,
panting. Did the crows fly down to eat it, hunger being the reason for their
chase? Nope. They just flew away. Mission accomplished, I guess, although
what the mission could have been, beyond playing a cruel game, is a mystery
to me.

When I?m at the Fill, I vastly prefer to see the kindness of nature, and not
its cruelty. And that is the real lesson I take from nature. Since we humans
can exert so much control over our own environment, i.e., our culture, then
we have the choice about whether to create a kind or a cruel way to treat
each other.

I would rather spend my life creating kindness. To me, creating kindness
makes the world a better place. Creating kindness creates a beauty as
transcendent as nature itself. I, and every other human being on the planet,
have the power to create kindness in life every single day.

I couldn?t stop Rita. No one could. But I can make a donation to help the
Red Cross. I can insist that my government collect enough taxes and spend
the money wisely enough to create levees that don?t burst.

I couldn?t stop Rita, but I can do something kind for someone today. For
every bad thing that happens to me in my life, I can do a good thing. Even
if the goodness I do has nothing to do with changing the bad thing that
happened, it still changes my little world. It still creates kindness.

Creating kindness gives meaning to life. - Connie, Seattle

csidles at isomedia.com