In my backyard I have a handsome old sweet gum tree. Every season it drops what seems like millions of seed balls. Annoying as they can be, I dutifully rake them up and bag them without much complaining.
I have a friend who had a sweet gum tree also. The seed balls were a time-consuming mess. Everything about the tree boiled down to that. So he cut the tree down.
He didn’t see its shade in the summer and its color in the fall. He didn’t see how complex and beautiful the seed balls were in pattern and spherical structure. He didn’t think about how long it took nature to solve this botanical problem so elegantly.
And here for me is the twisted parable. Nature is not the drama of evolution. Nature is not the interconnected family we belong to. Nature is ornament. Nature is to be bent to our will. We don’t belong to nature. Nature belongs to us.
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