With newspapers, radio, and television covering COVID-19 and other bad news across the globe, I seek comfort by attuning to that other, grander, more vastly sane world upon which we have so long encroached. It is what, in my childhood, used to be called “the natural world,” as though there is something “unnatural” about human society.It’s early spring where I live in southern Ontario. There are juncos in the garden, small songbirds, gray of plumage, with tiny pink beaks. They flash white outer tail feathers as they fly. They are transient, on their way to more northern forests of pines and balsam and birch, rocky outcroppings of Precambrian rock, lichen-encrusted and fringed with ferns. But that’s to come. Now, pert and perfect, I find in them nothing less than a perfection of form and…
Exposing the Big Game 