Otherness

In a ferociously busy week, including a full day of rehearsals today, I've actually found time somehow to watch a couple of episodes of Life on Earth from my DVDs. To do so was therapeutic in the extreme, though I'm not exactly sure why. But I can say with utter certainty that the shots of the storks nesting in the small Bavarian town before setting off on their long trek to Africa (in the episode on birds) did me a whole lot of good.

I suppose their natural beauty and grace had a lot to do with it. (I'm fascinated, by the way, at the whole notion of the beautiful, suspecting that our ability to recognise it is one of our more important gifts. Possibly the only one worth having.) But I think there's something else important here. It's being confronted by the glorious knowledge that there's something not remotely us out there which makes us look pretty mundane, pretty much earthbound.

It's all a bit Wordsworthian really, but old William, and, more particularly, young William knew more than a thing or two.