Play It Again, Gaia
On my walk the other morning, I passed by a point in the woods where two pileated woodpeckers seemed to be in the throes of a frenzied debate. Listening to their contrapuntal cacophony, I could not help but think they had escaped from nature’s version of a psychiatric ward. And this is true for the whole lot of them. Perhaps, many eons ago, the first pileated slammed its face into a tree one too many times. (And you have to wonder what the other animals must have thought when that first winged oddity of black and white and red showed up on the scene.
“What on Earth is that thing?” one wooly mammoth asks another.
“Beats me.”
“And why does he keep head butting that tree?”
“I dunno. Must be a loon.”
“You got that right. That one sure won’t last long.”)
As I rambled on, pondering over the evolutionary conundrum that is the pileated woodpecker, I became more aware of the entire environmental aria that I had been missing while lost in my own little mental world. Ah, the tyranny of thinking….
It was really just grand (the aria, that is). Every note on the scale was being hit by some living instrument at some moment. The measures were not quite in sync, for sure, and yet the melodies came together in a strangely enthralling harmony that carried me with it as I tripped along.
