Someone just wheeled a clattering cart of chairs two hundred yards down the pebbled sidewalk from Dulcinea to the Welcome Center, obliterating all sound from the valley, and I’m now convinced we are the rudest, most irritating species on the planet.
And I’m including the Grackle on that list.
Every other creature, predator and prey alike, keeps to the general idea that you make noise when you need to. Otherwise you stay quiet.
Can you imagine how wonderful it must have sounded before we got here? Every sound would have been unconsciously created by the earth and her plants and creatures. Natural sounds, we call them. Those who claim human noise is also natural are logically right but wrong in every way that matters. There is a reason we leave our cities and go to wild places to hear the sounds of Nature.
We know something about us is not natural.
We know we left the garden long ago and the way back to innocence is guarded by an angel with a flaming sword.
We are Nature’s prodigal children who demanded our inheritance and said to her, “Give me what I want or I will take it from you by force and be damned the consequences.”
And yet, of all her children we are the only ones to call her “mother” and commemorate her beauty in paint, verse, and song.
Somewhere in the mix of the best and worst of us can be found the secret of humanity.