Everyday it is my habit to rise before dawn, make my coffee and then head to the computer to read the morning paper. On some mornings it seems as though it is just one dismal story after another. Thankfully, occasionally I’m surprised and reminded that this world of ours has something new to teach us everyday.

Today’s Toronto Star is the case in point –  In one headline a 9-year-old boy in Brampton, Ontario is shot dead in his own home. Gang violence I guess. Not a usual thing for the GTA really; atleast not so usual that we ignore it. I will say it is becoming more and more common to read of gun violence in the GTA, sadly.

It saddens me this violence. Of course it does, how can it not? Always it is the same question – why? I mean, sure, why can’t we all just get along … but let’s be real here, we don’t always get along. Humans never have. We are going to have conflicts, we are going to strike out in anger, we are going to at times have to defend ourselves, but it should NOT become the norm. Somehow I think sometimes it is easy to lose site of the fact that we should not ALWAYS need to be in defense mode. So often though we are. Whether you be commuting in the GTA or bumping along on your tractor down some country road, everyone at some point it seems in our world now has the shields up, ready for attack at any time.

We are all scared of each other. Now everyone, people you see every day but don’t know, are “the other”. They just might be a friendly, but ya just can’t be sure. They might want to take something you got – might want to do you harm. So…SHIELDS UP. We are cut off from one another now more than ever. Communities that once thrived are disappearing, often right before our very eyes, but often we are blind.

BUT than? Than I read farther down the page and I see, again, our fellow creatures still have a thing or two to teach us … if we will listen.

Sperm whales adopt deformed dolphin
Toronto-born behavioural ecologist Alexander Wilson has discovered an unlikely friendship in the North Atlantic.

A group of sperm whales have apparently adopted a bottlenose dolphin with a spine deformity, swimming alongside him and at times nuzzling and rubbing up against him, at least temporarily.

Wilson and partner Jens Krause of the Leibniz-Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries in Berlin made the discovery in 2011 while observing sperm whales about 15 to 20 kilometres off the island of Pico in the Azores.
[Laura Kane-Staff Reporter | The Toronto Star ]

I’m reminded of that small boy. His life cut short, for what? Some argument between people he doesn’t even know? I think we often miss the subtle messages of our surroundings. Where you grow is as essential as that which is growing around you. Take a tree. In order for it to thrive it needs to have its needs met. Water, light and soil all play a role. Yet to thrive every gardener eventually learns that natural landscapes require a certain synergy with their surroundings. Nothing can thrive without that synergy.

Each of the patches that makes us what we are is fluid and changing. However like migrating Robins with Cedar Waxwings, we make partnerships and stick together in order to thrive, and arrive alive.

It seems that in our quest for civilization we are in the processes of destroying the very essence of what it is we thought made us unique. We are not unique, we are not special, we are merely an animal. Perhaps its time we began to act like one.

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