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“That tree’s singing.”, said my father quietly after grandma’s funeral, out of the blue, out of place. I followed his eye line and caught his thought, his longing.  Consciousness can sometimes be too much a burden to take on, and somewhere down the line we wish to shed it, to throw it away, to lose our mind, to be anything but human. In the face of pain all we may wish is to be anaesthetized. What an irrational, improbable desire!- which makes things all the more tragic-the fact that we can never run away from ourselves, that we are trapped within our immediate locale and never able to transcend it, to look at loss as part of a  grand scheme that may thousand years from now be reciprocated, be redeemed, which does not matter to us at all.

Can human learn from the non-human world? I’d say yes, but only as an extension of their desire to visualize an alternative way of life, an alternative system of meanings, as a metaphor for an idea that we nourish. Human project their wisdom onto the non-human world and admire its shape, its beauty- as we see our philosophy incarnate. There are no lesson hidden, waiting to be unfolded and absorbed.