Thoughts to discard

 Do not seek a happy life. If you eat and drink too much, you will sicken and lose your mental capabilities due to excess. 

Do not think to create happiness with an honest and sincere love life, which is the only kind worth having, for  someone with more guile will take advantage of you and destroy the humble basis of your existence by exploiting you. 

Wealth will make you mad with jealousy and fear and with it you will be unable to form any real relationships. You will live a false life.

Do not think you can be healthy, a paragon of beauty and energy. All age and die in excruciating ways, like paper in a slow fire, or your physical being will be destroyed by the tawdry accidents of life. 

In conclusion: happiness is a non-functional concept. Its assumptions do not correlate to reality. Seeking happiness will make you helpless. 

The alternative is worse. That opposite is reality, and who wants anything to do with that?

An eagle waits out winter on the first day of spring

Waiting out the last hours till spring in winter's weak morning light.

 Maybe she had no clue, but I think this bald eagle was well-aware that today is the first day of spring. For seemingly no reason, she's perched facing the morning sun, when the creek and the fish are behind and just below her. Why would she face the way she is, deliberately ignoring breakfast, unless she's celebrating some sort of eagle equinox?

Birds have to sense when spring is coming, they just have to. Their lives depend on it. Sometimes humans are so thick-skulled that they are unaware that knowledge comes in many forms. The stirring of instinct is just as vital to birds as any reminder on your phone that today winter is over, perhaps more so. Imagine what it would be like, how exciting it would be, if your entire being tingled on the day of the equinox. Imagine if you became more alive today with instinct.

That's what a real knowledge of life would be, I think. It's far more vital, clearer, more clever and more exhilarating, than listening to your phone buzz.

That's why I think this eagle is facing winter's last morning sun. It's her joy and her reason to live. The fish below can wait.

She just has to sit there and fly on folded wings toward the season of rebirth.

Deferring personally to a male northern cardinal

 Why does this male northern cardinal seem so much better than me? He's definitely better-looking, and it might not be too much of a stretch to say he appears more intelligent. Is he a better creature? More ethical? Does he laugh easier? Is his grooming better? Feeling as I do today about myself, I would have to say he is.

They claim pictures don't lie, and since I took this picture, I would have to assert I am honest. But am I more honest than my subject? What lies has he told? Do they exceed or pale before mine? Or did he never lie? I guess the only way to know is if I switched places with him for just an hour so so, he took over my brain and I took over his.

Or has that already happened?

What an odd experience it is to take a photograph of a bird that shows him in a better light than the photographer.

Or is that always the case with wildlife photos?

Are we showing them to better than we are? Or are we just wishing we were more like them?

Gaze into this male northern cardinal's eyes and you might find the answer.