Self Pity

I never saw a wild thing
sorry for itself.
A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough
without ever having felt sorry for itself.

-D. H. Lawrence

Thoughts & Analysis

Humans. Here we are, thinking we’re the most advanced creatures in the cosmos, and we’ve been outdone by a chickadee. Or a wren, or any number of other small birds who live and die with equal grace.

Grace is a quality we humans seem to be lacking nowadays, with some notable exceptions. By in large, even the best of us find ourselves wallowing in self pity from time to time. And, most of the time, we’re not even being frozen to death.

Perhaps we have strayed too far from our wild origins. Perhaps a return to the wild is the secret to regaining the grace of the “small bird” in Lawrence’s poem.

Unless we find ourselves in the company of those rare human souls who do live gracefully, our best teacher is the wild itself: those beings who have not forgotten.

We find we must apprentice ourselves to the stones that sit atop mountains, watching millennia of sunrises and sunsets. To study the elder trees and listen for their songs in the clear night.

To watch the river otter paddle quietly downstream and then disappear, leaving only ripples behind. To notice how a small brown bird gathers seeds and then perches on a dried stalk of goldenrod.

The more we immerse ourselves in nature, and the more we commit to developing the admirable qualities of the beings we encounter there, the more we begin to develop that quiet grace.

To die gracefully, we must learn to live gracefully. To live gracefully is a daily practice. Who else can we learn this from but the chickadee, the sparrow, the wren?