I Choose The Bear

There are creatures whose purpose is not to keep everything alive. Their purpose is to stop life from consuming itself. I think about that often. How strange it is that the animal we are most tempted to call dangerous may be the very thing holding an entire ecosystem balanced enough for more life to flourish. A bear does not apologise for hunger. Humans seem to be the only animal determined to turn nature into a play. We want heroes. We want villains. I have spent enough of my life outside to know that beauty is rarely gentle for very long. The same landscape that gives shelter can also tear it away. The same water that keeps everything alive can also spread deadly disease. Nature does not promise kindness. It promises change. Maybe that is why predators matter so much. They remind us that balance is not the absence of death. It is the cycle of life and death. Call something dangerous long enough and destroying it starts to sound like the responsible thing to do. Then years later we stand inside a barren landscape wondering what happened. The answer is usually that we forgot the world was never built around our comfort. The predator belongs to the prey as much as the prey belongs to the predator. There are nights when I hear something moving beyond the light and remember how recently humans were also part of this equation. Animals among animals. Humanity lost something important when we decided being civilised meant standing apart from the Nature that made us. From the Earth that sustains us still. We became very good at naming Nature. Less good at remembering we are also Nature. That is why I keep returning to wild places. They correct the social constructs in my head. They remind me that life survives because there are beginnings for every ending. The land remembers it all. Beyond the edge of roads and wifi zones, a predator moves through the warm shadows while humans argue in sterile rooms about whether it deserves to exist anymore. It simply does. And because it does, something else gets to live.