The Folly of Modern Life
Reader’s Digest April/May 2026 p 21
“Don’t Trim the Azalea”
I found this quote in an article that struck a chord with
me. Often on our mountain property, I have commented that our purchased land doesn’t
belong to me, but to the animals that call it ‘home’ every day. I’m just the traveler
moving through, as this land has been there for eons.
“It’s a sad folly of modern life that we think we’re somehow
separated from the natural fabric in which we live. It’s a perspective built on
a calculus of artifice – brick by brick by technological advance, we’ve convinced
ourselves that we live apart from the bird and the turtle and the fox. But it’s
a perspective that diminishes the lives of both humans and wild creatures. In a
world older and more complete than ours, animals move finished and complete, gifted
with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices
we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are
other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow
prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.” ~ Henry Beston The Outermost House.
The article goes on to say that in a lot of ways, how we live
our lives is a matter of choosing how we wish to impact those “other nations.” A
bird flushing from a side-yard Azalea is proof that those other nations aren’t “out
there” in some abstract fashion: they live among us and with us and alongside
us. Whether it’s a drive to the grocery store or an approach to lawn care, the
act of everyday living has real-world impact on our furred, feathered, scaled
and exoskeletoned fellow travelers. We either choose to ignore our impact on
those other nations, or we choose to be as neighborly as possible.
There is an obligation that comes with living on the only
planet we have. My little plot of land with huge pine trees and/or my neatly urban
trimmed shrubs are not mine alone, nor is anywhere that I’ll ever plant a
footprint in this life. The other nations are everywhere…and more reliant on
harmony and benevolence than ever before.
