Love of Life

It was a cool spring day.  A stiff northwest breeze was blowing up in the foothills.  I had just finished all my early day duties and decided to sit outside the entry booth of the Elena Gallegos Park.  It is a wonderful view that contains a vista that runs some 150 miles across, on an average clear New Mexico day.  You can see mountains, volcanoes, mesas and buttes across the entire horizon.  The Rio Grande river snakes from north to south, and the entire city of Albuquerque is laid out before you like an aerial road map.   

The Elena Gallegos Park is run by the city of Albuquerque, it is a multi use facility, with about 700 acres of hiking, biking and horseback riding trails.  There are also picnic and barbeque areas and in all sees about 150,000 visitors a year.  At the time, I was a park attendant at the park, taking care of cleaning, and maintenance of the park and facilities.

I had sat down right next to a juniper that sits just north of the parks entry booth.  No sign of any one around until a man in full biking outfit came cruising along trail 365.  This trail runs in full view of where I sat and crosses the road to the park just some 70 feet in front of me.  This cyclist crossed the road and kept riding until the trail takes a slope down into the south pino arroyo.  He got off his bike and stopped, looking back for someone.  About 10 seconds went by when a second biker rode into view.  This cyclist was much smaller, and wearing a pink and blue outfit and pink helmet. The cyclist slowly crossed the road, and just before she got to the other side stopped to walk her bike over a large bump where the trail continued.  Or at least that is the reason I thought she had stopped for.  She stood there straddling her bike, looking straight down on the ground just in front of her bike.  She would not move.  She would not take her eyes off the ground.

The first cyclist now yelled out loudly, “What are you waiting for?!”  No answer came from the small pink biker.  Now noticeably upset the first cyclist yelled again, “Get on your #%&! Bike and get going!”  The pink cyclist then said rather softly and with a frightened tone,” but there are ants.  I do not want to hurt the ants.”

I will always remember this next statement, because it so puts into reference what motivates, and controls so much of what most people think in today’s, 21^st century, American society.  And that motivational control is fear.  Fear of the unknown, Nature, and the fear of oneself. 

The pink clad cyclist’s father then yells, “Get on your bike right now, the hell with the ants…. Do you want the coyotes to get you and kill you?   I sat there in complete shock.  Here is a 6 to 7 year old girl, I am guessing, one with such sensitivity to life around her, life itself and she is yelled at, her feelings ignored, and fear instilled in her to boot.  She got on her bike, rode off and disappeared into the arroyo.

I sat there, having witnessed an answer to a question I have beaten myself up with time and time again.  Why or how does this society, feel so removed, so uncaring for our mother earth? 

We are born caring.  Love is part of us from the start.  Just like that pink colored cyclist.   It is nurturing, or lack of it, it is society, or lack of it, that strips this love from us. We also view nature as wilderness.  Not natural, but wild.  Wild is to be tamed, that is the stance this society preaches.  Ants on the ground are natural.  That little girl had enough love in her heart to feel for those ants.  

Nature is pure love. Nature is part of us.  Deep in our genes nature lies.