After our visit to the Wolf Sanctuary last weekend I am a bit wolf-obsessed. And it seems like I'm not alone in that: a week or two ago this video was making the rounds, called How Wolves Change Rivers. Our tour guide at the sanctuary even said they're going to use the video in their programs.I highly recommend you watch the video, which is about four and a half minutes long, although it doesn't seem it - but I'll give you a summary anyway.
Yellowstone was starting to turn brown, because deer and elk were overpopulating and getting lazy and eating all the vegetation in certain areas, near the banks of rivers where the water was close. The ecodiversity was leaving the park, and slowly killing it.
So they introduced wolves back to the park. And gradually the populations of the rest of the members of the food chain started to level out, and the deer started to move, and the grass and shrubs grew, and animal species that had left came back, and erosion reduced, and eventually (after 8 years or so) the rivers changed, and became more fixed in their course.
And so, one species changed the entire park, right down to the actual earth and its geography. Wolves changed everything.
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I finished a book, Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern, on Sunday night, and I still can't get it out of my head. When I was little I used to spend the whole summer reading, and when I got to the end of a really great book I would fall into a post-story depression. Depending on how much the plot swept me up, I would be more or less upset, and came out of it quicker or slower.
Books like this change the way you look at the world. This one made it seem believable that we could actually be surrounded by magic in our world, and not see it that way because we have been trained (or trained ourselves) not to.
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Now that I've started writing this post, I'm having a hard time focusing away from the fact that each of our experiences changes the way we see everything that happens from this point forward; everyone we've known changes how we meet new people and get to know them.
And this is true; this is a real fact of every day. But I think what I'm really getting at is those BIG changes, the paradigm-shakers and -shifters, the hairpin turns and one-eighties. Like the job I found on Craigslist two and a half years ago: As a result of that one application my daily routine, the way I have viewed the world, and even the people that are now an inseparable part of my life have changed.
Like my friend Jordan deciding to leave his fairly secure workplace to travel the world (and writing about that decision for the blog a few months ago.
Like my friend Mary going to seminary. Like she, Jordan, and me (and all our classmates) choosing to enroll at St. Olaf College when we were 17. Like my dad leaving medical school. Like my grandparents (all five of them) becoming missionaries.
All of these examples are intentional: we all decided to do those things. And our lives took a certain course from then on as a result, far too complicated to even begin to talk about in detail. In these examples, we are the body that decided to introduce wolves back into Yellowstone.
But there are other things that happen to us not by our own choice, that influence the course our lives take. Like the fact that my 11th grade history teacher came to my school on a St. Olaf program. Like my house getting broken into - twice - in two years. Like the churches that called my dad to serve them, leading him to consider options he would not have otherwise had, and leading us to grow up in the places we did.
Some are events of chance, if you believe in that; some choices made by others that influenced us, directly or indirectly.
I guess I don't really know what point I'm trying to make here... Just that we are interconnected and our actions influence each other. Acknowledge your ecosystems, and the series of events that brought you to where you are today, wherever that may be and however you might feel about it.
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I showed the wolves video to my parents the other night, and after that video was over we got sucked into one of the recommended videos, a full-length documentary about a couple who moved in with a wolf pack in the Idaho mountains.
We didn't have time to finish it before dinner, but right before we turned it off they introduced some new pups into the pack.
And for the rest of the evening we were left wondering, what happened to the pups? That one hour of video, spurred by sharing the Yellowstone video, spurred by our visit to the Wolf Sanctuary, got us invested in the fates of a family far from our own, in more ways than one.
posted from Bloggeroid
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