So I was making myself some breakfast the other day. I try to hit all the food groups when I eat, so on this particular morning, I was making myself a peanut butter and strawberry jam sandwich. This strawberry jam is particularly awesome because it was homemade by my lovely wife with strawberries we picked on a local farm.
As I was putting the super-duper jam on, a big blob of unmixed stawberry part came out and made its way to my sandwich. I was thinking to myself that if I left it that way one bite of my sandwich would be particularly sweet. The thought of this and when I might actually get that bite kind of hit me as being sort of random. My particular inclinination at that point was that this surprise bite would be rather negative, then it hit me that it would actually be kind of nice! THEN it hit me again that this mindset is what keeps people from wanting to get involved with and actually dig deep into nature study.
I know what you are thinking, "Did he actually equate nature study with a peanut butter and jam sandwich?". The answer is yes, so let me try to explain.
As I share some of these topics, particularly edible and medicinal plants with others. Everyone seems to want to categorize everything and put it into nice little neat boxes, categories, sub-categories, etc. Yes there are methods for doing so, and on more intellectual, scientific, and or deeper level one would have to do exactly that, to maintain some type of order to his/her study. But I believe that we each have to accept that there is alot of "randomness" in nature and simply be OK with it. For example, one of the things I have done through the Kamana program of Wilderness Awareness School is to have a "secret spot", or sometimes called a "sit spot". At this spot you simply sit and observe, every day. What often appears as random, will sometimes become a regular occurrence. What one might thinks is regular, will often times become random. It is rather enlightening to say the least. That raccoon that I saw one day in the morning, wasn't just happenstance, he was actually on his morning routine back to his home. I only knew this because of regularly sitting and observing.
If you start observing nature in both a large sense to try and take in the whole picture, and also at the same time focus on individual parts, you will begin to see this. Several years ago, I owned a farm that I cooperatively worked with both the Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife and the Department of Natural Resources, Division of Foresty. I learned so much working with those guys, one small thing I was shown by the forester was how different tree species will congregate in drainages, and other places where water is likely to be. Yes, I know how the sycamore likes water (almost all of have notices that), but he was showing me how different sub-species of oaks like water, vs. how other sub-species of oaks like the ridge tops.
To the untrained eye (mine in this case) I saw that as randomness. To his trained eye, he saw order. The wildlife biologist that I was working with had spent basically his entire Master's Degree study and thesis on turkey vultures, (please don't call them buzzards :)). What appeared to me as random birds eating road kill, became an orderly species, highly valuable species to the overall ecology of any place.
Again, randomness is OK. Order is OK. Most of us are not OK with random, because so much of our lives are in order for us (think fast food). So I write this to encourage our readers who overwhelmed with random.....be OK with it. Time, patience, and study of random, may very well lead to a more orderly study of nature.
