From the nights with its cold breath, through the symphony of swiftly passing time to the golden showers of sunrays at dawn, on every clock, the stride of each tick only re-echoes the outlook that nature is the most fascinating phenomenon there is. Our beautiful earth is bursting with life and light, love and strife accentuating the most vital lessons hardly ever learnt.
With what then shall I juxtapose nature? It is the crazy old woman of the village, who though a repository of knowledge has been immobilized, criticized, censored, stigmatized, terrorized, mishandled, characterized and marginalized. Yet every shriek she lets out is another undervalued didactic.
As my mom said once; we are living in the wilds, every one of us; from the insomnia stricken cities of America to the soundless chiefdoms in Ghana. We each are a representation of nature’s fine story and a lesson taught inherently.
The glorious January 4th, my birthday this year has a panorama in my mind so vivid I could almost re-enact every moment of that day with utmost precision. I cannot in all my life forget the parable of the bald eagle that my mom so well recited. It is a colorful memory of the timeline of the eagle; the most daunting and formidable of its species that could live as long as seven decades; fighting, finding, surviving.
Yet in its 40th year, all the youthfulness wanes; it begins to grow weary from short flights, its talons lose their grips, its beak blunts and bents. It is at this point the once mighty eagle is faced with the reality of two alternatives; either to die or undergo a rebirth, and candidly, the latter is no less agonizing than the former.
If it chooses to live, it will experience a bloody ordeal that involves beating its beak constantly against a rock until it falls out. It repeats similar excruciating processes to pluck out all its talons and old feathers.
After 5 months of horrendous pain, the eagle would have grown a new set of sharper talons, a plumage of fresher feathers, a piercing beak and a renewed forte that could enable it thrive for another 30 years.
Nature projects the moral that life involves a continuous process of experiencing hardships. But hardships are only temporary. We men ought to appreciate hardships as a chance for us to re-write out pasts, purify our former thoughts and sideline our prejudices in order to regain the motivation we require to continue life. Is it not only when we have shed our past that we can enjoy the present? To merry in change and the aftermath we experience, we all need to come to terms with the fact that travail is a catapult for upgrading our capabilities.
Moreover, nature teaches a lesson of competitiveness, reiterating my mom’s assertion that we all live in the wilds. Even in the cities riddled with little appreciation of the natural, men admire from a distance the beauty of the verdure of nature, how their favorite flowers bloom with color and fragrance in the cloudburst of the rainy season or how they wilt in the trade winds of the harmattan. What a lot of people are oblivious to is the competition our favorite roses endure with ubiquitous green weeds.
From birth till death we, in a bid to sustain ourselves each contend for the things we want most. Everybody is looking for something; love and attention, money and social status, authority and machismo and are willing to vie for these which are only sufficient to belong to a few. Such competition is a necessity for change. It is what we have held on to to break the fetters of slavery, apartheid and racism, despondent colonialism and tyranny. Nature has taught every one of us that we must strive for our interest and defend what is dear to us.
It doesn’t end there. For the things that plague our world; global warming, climate change, ocean acidification, nature (the old woman) has taught us to be circumspect in our relations with her because there is a dire consequence for every step we take to undervalue her.