Part #4: Do Animals Have Worth?

Why does the human species seek meaning and purpose?
Why do humans study nature, the cosmos, reality?
Why are we curious, creative, doubtful, rational?

Why do many of us seek to preserve other species, in danger of extinction?

CONSIDER THIS AMAZING OTHER CREATURE IN NATURE which shows the incredible creativity and intelligent potential in life and existence:

It gives new contrary meaning to the negative term: bird brain.

"A red knot’s incredible journey"
by Jeremy Taylor

"Imagine flying the equivalent of the distance from the earth to the moon and partway back. Now imagine doing this if you weighed only four ounces! Sounds incredible, but this is exactly what one bird has done over the last two decades."

"The red knot (Calidris canutus) has one of the longest migrations of any bird, travelling nearly 10,000 miles each spring and fall between its summer breeding range in the Arctic to the winter range in southern Chile and Argentina.

"...this trip has successfully been made twice a year for at least 21 years in a row by a male red knot, dubbed “Moonbird” due to the cumulative
distance he has flown.
"First banded at two years of age in 1995 in Rio Grande, Tierra del Fuego, Argentina, Moonbird...B95...has become a celebrity of sorts.
Read the rest at: http://www.dec.ny.gov/docs/administration_pdf/0415moonbird.pdf
And read, The Narrow Edge: A Tiny Bird...by Deborah Cramer

How do the young Red Knots do this?! When they are born, they have never been from the Arctic to the bottom of Argentina.

They leave separately later than the adult Red Knots and have no guide. As the science writer Chet Raymo points out, how do the young on their own "make their way along a route they have never traveled to a destination they have never seen?"

According to scientists their DNA contains "...the map of the migration route and the skills to follow it...The red knot's brain is a flexible organ, capable of wiring itself by experience." p.25, Raymo, Skeptics and True Believers

Factually amazing things about nature, astronomy, animals, etc. intrigued me as a kid, and still do as a retired oldster. When I was in 4th grade our teacher had us do bird studies, find feathers and nests, and do so many other interesting activities.
And as an aging learner, I was astounded to find out that now scientists think that crows have the intelligence of a 7-year-old human!!

So I don't understand those human leaders who have a demeaning attitude toward existence, to those who state that live species are "just chemicals," or only atoms, or many others who take a predatory approach to animals, denying they have any inherent worth.

Yes, I know that nature is often 'tooth and claw.' Especially when our cat Smoke brings us a gift of a small bird. And I used to be a hunter, had a Remington shotgun and a rifle (given to me at 12 by my grandfather).
BUT
we humans are more than instinct. We have a sense of transcendence, a sense of ought, and a rational understanding that reality isn't only survival, isn't only about us, but that reality has the real potential for creativity, beauty, and truth.

Animals didn't come into existence for us humans. The sentient ones have their own worth and value.

In the Light,

Daniel Wilcox

Baptizing Cars and Us, (the Friendly Way)

A serendipity, an unplanned blessing, came one morning as I drove down Bradley Road. Very unexpectedly, as I had been struggling through a severe spiritual crisis, yet another pilgrim's regress.*

It's Saturday. I’ve run an errand, am headed for work. But then I see that hunched, elderly man, the one who stands on Bradley at a narrow crossroad, his thumb out, hitchhiking most days of the week.

I never stop because traffic here is bad, very heavy and there is no side lane, and, besides, there are miles to go before I rest. I haven't earned enough money, self-employed.

But today, incredibly, no cars are crowding my back-bumper, so I go with my alert conscience and concern, and stop for the oldster.

Swarthy, leather-skinned, in old wrinkled clothes, he almost looks homeless, and is hunched over as if someone has curled his spine; his one gnarled hand holds a small trash bag, maybe his lunch.

Gingerly, he climbs into my Sienna and thanks me.

But I can hardly understand what else he is saying because he speaks with a heavy Spanish accent and has a serious voice impediment. He sits there bent forward, his face weathered, like dark brown parchment.

But finally, I figure out he has 13 grandkids and his wife died from cancer 18 months ago and
that he works at a carwash
and is 82 years old!

We commune, even though it is hard to understand most of his rumpled words.

My heavy load of grief lightens.

I leave him off near his work where he baptizes cars with water Baptist-style.

But even though we speak no religious language and Friends don't practice rituals such as baptism and communion,
the hitchhiker and I live in a precious moment,
a present meeting,
a transcendent baptism
in the Light.

In the Light,
Daniel Wilcox

*(Does a person's spiritual journey ever reach the proverbial mountain top? Or at least a little peaceful oasis in the barren desert of ached spiritual longing?)

harvest or 'leaving'

harvest present
versus
autumn 'leaving'

burned-over dreams in the rusted oil drum
behind our faded house of fallen child
midwest blown by dark thundered storm

hedged branches, clumped together on the lawn
waiting to become ashes wafted cumulus
piles of browned cuttings lost to history

yet writing stems up greening between
lined cracks in the disjointed concrete walk
behind our parsonage, weeds of wonder
between hard slabs of the displaced past

in front, raking my fallen memories up
shoving those windblown scatterings
off our green lawn, dumping them over
down into a gully-ditched pile

rising up, 3 feet of dry-colored splash
a crinkly mass of discarded leaving
bursting red-scarlet, yellow-gold, orange, and tan
for struggling kids-of-heart to jump in

-Daniel Wilcox
First pub. in Words-Myth Magazine,
then in the poetry collection, Dark Energy
Diminuendo Press, Texas

-

Leaving Off Leaving

Leaving in the fall of harvested years
Dark colors shade and give to grayness,
Vibrant and vivid memories fade away
Scattering with the barren wind of winter;

The past burst of life firework-spangled
Now only falls dead embered and ashed,
Sometimes one last fizzle of brief autumn.

Leaving off leaving

Leaving behind our shining, aspiring dreams
Dark forebodings rise, failed hopes fragment,
Broken crumbling shale of envisioned plans

Crunch under the shifting strata of history;
Now only grit, gravel and dust remain, 'ore'
The grimmed remainders of old 'talings.'

Leaving off leaving

Leaving off these soul somber dirges, we go
Deeply inward to the eternal equator
Of the transcendent within our inner becoming
Where ‘psalms’ forever green in their vivid verdancy
Of that brilliant light that candled the cosmos;

Behind this anguished world so fallen to despair,
Shines forth one Ultimate’s ideal, the shimmering
Lodestar of illuminable-illimitable
Beauty and glorious perfection.

Leaving off leaving

Regrets--life's most wept weapings, keen,
Laments leafing we never stop shedding,
Streams flow ever ill-crease and redden
The puffy setting of our swollen eyes.

Our plummeting wailing into the dark catacombs
Of elder age like black matter, forgiven wrongs
And destroyed hopes refuse to leave our troubled self
Dimming the Light shining into becoming.

Leaving this leaving

Relentless remorse and despair cancers away
Morning from tearing up in geysered joy.
And we grieve our journey'd 'trial' to demise,
Our only hope the Everlasting Divine.

Leaving


--Daniel Wilcox
First pub. in the poetry
collection, selah river

--


Fall Impression

In that fall of Nebraska's weather so dying,
Sun-jaded trees ungreened and thundered color

Reverberating the world, 'Gogh'ing to the limit;
They left tremoring rainbows burst earth-bound and shingled

In that wind--melted yellow, orange, and maroon,
Fingerpaints jagged, leaved in those black wrought branches;

Then with the stroke of more rogue northerly gusts,
The zagged etchings counter-wheeled in swirling emotion—

Hacking our senses, 'hueing' our minds until acrylic glazed--
And so reeled and rolled diagonally down in that kaleidoscoping Monet.


--Daniel Wilcox
First pub. in The Write Side Up
and Dark Energy poetry collection

In the Light,

Daniel Wilcox