And what will happen if the green finch goes, (with those delicate shades of green)? Am I entitled not to care? No. It just hasn’t dawned on me that humans are one glorious species beside neighbours equally glorious in their diversity. Mistakenly, I think myself above their company.
And so I miss out on how God is speaking to me in millions of different ways. In the words of Rumi, the great Sufi mystic, ‘there are thousands of ways to kneel and kiss the ground’! He could have been referring to how other creatures compose their worship.
Meanwhile plants and animals are shyly waiting on a nod of recognition from us, so they can share, for instance, how ‘the long work of turning their lives into a celebration is not easy’, (Mary Oliver).
And so, what a loss it will have been, if we never did say hello! Or goodbye! That we let them all go without a thought because they were different from us. Because we don’t do feathers or flight, or long-haul ocean voyages as whales do, singing to one another; and don’t ‘get’ insect communal things; or have lichen reveries. Or know anything of their spiritual being.
When John Feehan chose as a book title, ‘The Singing Heart of the World’, he was referring to creation’s response to the Creator. If we consider our beautiful earth as having anything less than a singing heart, we need to go and ask the willow or the swallow, ‘how do you pray?’ Or better still, ‘pray for us!’