One June day a few summers ago, I saw something beautiful, something profound, something too rarely practiced, something whose ramifications are too rarely considered.

I did not see the ultimate trophy home, not an immaculately manicured lawn or golf course, not the latest over-powered muscle car, not a world record set of elk antlers, not the world’s tallest tree, not the most symmetrical set of African elephant tusks ever found, not a beauty pageant, nor some masterfully played athletic contest.

I did not see Leonardo’s “the Last Supper,” Michelangelo’s “The David,” Rodin’s “The Kiss,” O’Keeffe’s “The White Place,” nor a stellar performance of Mozart’s 41st (Jupiter) symphony. I have, at one time or another, experienced all five of these—and each moved me to tears.

While visiting husband and wife dear friends, also long-time university faculty colleagues, I did see a woman thrilled to silence upon spotting four scaled quail resting on an upper limb of the large and ancient juniper pine tree in her New Mexico front yard. She, without design or chagrin, admired her wild neighbors, wished them well, stood quietly with tear-filled eyes, and left them undisturbed. I knew something of how she thought, what she believed, and the real gold-cored, platinum-plated gem was that she, without need of ponder, was seeing beyond.

She was seeing beyond the beauty and majesty of these small, exquisite survivors; beyond the pleasure of knowing that they, members of a largely ground-dwelling species, had chosen that high limb in that special tree for a moment of arboreal respite. The scaled quail is a creature of the Southwest, but their range extends into extreme SW Kansas. 

The woman was later told by an Indian medicine man that the tree was just over 200 years old and that a hole in the tree’s trunk was where Indian medicine folk collected the gummy, resinous sap, which they boiled until the sap was soft, then used it as a poultice for blisters and other wounds.

The woman’s thoughts were, no doubt, echoing those of Bertrand Russell (British philosopher and mathematician) when he wrote, “There is no impersonal reason for regarding the interests of human beings as more important than those of (sic other) animals. We can destroy animals more easily than they can destroy us; that is the only solid basis of our claim to superiority. We value art and science and literature because these are things in which we excel. But whales may value spouting and donkeys might maintain that a good bray is more exquisite than the music of Bach. We cannot prove them wrong except by the exercise of arbitrary power.”

Continuing this chain of thought, consider this by Francis Hodgson Burnett from her work A Little Princess: “How it is that animals understand things, I do not know, but it is certain that they do understand. Perhaps there is a language which is not made of words and everything in the world understands it. Perhaps there is a soul hidden in everything and it can always speak, without even making a sound, to another soul.”

The New Mexico woman was seeing beyond, was over-ruling the standard practice of humans who, from the beginning, have constantly put Nature on the defensive; was seeing beyond to the joy of just-letting-them-be; was reveling in the joy of knowing that these creatures own as much right to do their wild thing as do we—perhaps more if age of ancestral lineage counts for anything.

She was seeing beyond to the sterility of our society—a sterility tied directly to our incessant drive for individuality and for control. She was seeing beyond to our loss of contact with the majesty and mystery of our world; to our rejection of the divinity in all that lives and breathes and moves among us; to the realization that even though such as redwoods, mountains, great rivers, and oceans are not eternal, we need these structures much more than they need us.

She was seeing beyond to how some seasoned and considered souls know these things; to the regrettable fact that most people, both young and old, do not know or just can’t be bothered. She was seeing beyond to the reality that those scaled quail deserve better, that