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| Black Swans near Lake Burley Griffin |
About every two weeks and in all seasons I drive a short distance to Lake Burley Griffin and take a morning walk. I like to see happy families away from work, computers, televisions and shopping malls. I also see lots of dogs in all shapes and sizes glad to be walking beside their human friends. I also enjoy observing the black swans, the darters drying their wings in the sun, the busy sea gulls, water birds pecking in the lush grass with curved beaks.
We are more human when we share our lives benevolently with animals. There is a co-mingling of being, a communion of spirits.
On my walks around the lake I often recall Albert Schweitzer's ethic of reverence for life. Schweitzer thought that ultimately we can know very little about the cosmic meaning of life but it is plainly evident that the being in us, which is also will-to-live, is present in others and in animals and plants. Will-to-live means not only basic survival but species potential. At a higher level it is will-to-love. Schweitzer died in 1965. He is not very fashionable now. Perhaps he is forgotten. His reputation was not helped by writing most of his life as a theologian and a philosopher of an non-academic sort. He was probably a non-theist. He also mixed this up with medical missionary work in central Africa and got into trouble for not keeping up with medical technology. He was also a bit colonial and paternalistic in this thinking (being essentially a 19th century man). These in combination were bad for his posthumous career. He made his central ethic reverence for life and this ethic in a dynamic way he termed ethical mysticism. There is nothing mystical or supernatural about it. It is the mysticism of the kindly touching of other beings because we are at some level of the same stuff.
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| A Very Cute Family |
