 |
Environmental
Stewardship Commission
(MEESC) |
 |
|
Environmental
Stewardship Commission
(MEESC) |
|
Winter Trails
by the Rev Roger Weaver
We have been kept quite busy just keeping our trails open and tracks set. The snow keeps on filling them up just as soon as we finish setting them. We like to set trail and watch to see who else uses our routes. Usually the deer find them and let us know that they are around. Sometimes, when we have been feeding them near by, the trails tend to look more like a cow path than a foot path. Lately it seems that no one wants to use the trails except us. It seems pretty quiet all around us. Only the birds and the Weavers are doing much outside. Skye knows that under the snow things are very busy, but because we can't see that, we say that nothing is going on. It is just another quiet frozen up winter.
It is a quiet and frozen up winter except for the birds. They get around
even on the coldest days. With bird feeders fronting our living room windows,
there generally is a coming and going for us to watch. I can sit by that
wood stove looking out the windows, watching the birds and thinking of
nothing except that the feeders seem to be getting low.
It is at that time that the voice of conscience speaks up imitating
some naturalist from the DNR and saying, "You're creating a dependency!"
"Once you started you had better not quit." Guilty and still staring out
the window at our deadly welfare program, I am reminded of Farley Mowett's
anger over the way in which the Eskimo people along the Kazan River system
were seduced into dependency by and on the Hudson Bay Company. They left
their traditional ways of living on the barren lands, a food gathering
life style, to a life style based on a Hudson Bay economy. When the demand
for fur disappeared, then the Hudson Bay merely left the area, and the
Eskimos now left without their food gathering skills became the new form
of poverty for the barren lands.
You know I wouldn't want to do the same thing to the chickadees and the purple finches. I guess a person has to be especially careful nowadays. Maybe the trick is not to repeat yourself. Give a little here and a little there, but be careful that they don't become dependent on your regularity. Like a god who can jump in and out of history, keep them surprised and off guard so that they won't grow to expect it. Goodness knows how terrible the world would become if we all grew dependent on each other.
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