First thing each morning I feed the birds and squirrels and rabbits under the pine just a few feet from my deck, and watch them while I have coffee.  Yesterday two eagles glided above me, not in hunger and hunting it seemed but just in joy, the circles of their flight radiating out farther and farther, as though a stone had been tossed into the clear blue water of a pond, until they were out of sight.  And this morning, amid a profusion of doves and sparrows, and in one sudden beautiful arc of motion, a red-winged hawk swooped down and speared a sparrow and flew off, leaving its cry and a scattering of feathers in the pine needles, a kind of monument to the hawk's joy of a different kind. 

Nature can seem by turns beneficent or cruel, but only to us humans who created those concepts and the words for them . . . to eagles and hawks and sparrows they are simply part of the nature of their lives, of all life.  They are not burdened by foreknowledge of death or grief, heaven or hell; joy comes as it will and not because they hunger for it and pursue it.  They simply live, and live simply, in their nature and the natural seasons of all things.

What a different world you can make if you do no less, and no more.