Nature's Place

Frogs are sensitive creatures to be sure. Every day at dusk they welcome the night with calls to each other across the distance where I live, locating one another. From rainwater tank to rainwater tank they call. A deep, rhythmic croaking call.

Night time is when they come out of their daytime hiding and resting places, there are too many predators about during the day. I’m talking about the lovely green tree frogs that seem to survive very well without too many trees, but nature adapts to us, doesn’t it. As long as we make space for it. I make space for these frogs. And if it’s about to rain they know and start to croak it down. Welcome! Welcome! Nideep! Nideep!

This country has just been through the longest drought it’s known, as far as I know. But the thing about the creatures is they don’t have a problem with that, it’s not unusual in the history of this land. The creatures are in touch with the land, they are of the land and they know what they need to know of the land. It’s a deep inner knowing, not the knowing we know on the surface here of that’s Joe over there who just smashed his car, poor fellow.

It’s an inner sense of the sense of all things within their compass, or an innocence, innocent of the world of thinking. Animals don’t think. Just like babies. It’s what we love about them.

Frogs, who depend very much on a supply of fresh water, have a strategy for dealing with drought. They hibernate. They don’t just know when water is coming, they also know when water is not coming.

Not all species of frog do this but when drought is coming many dig themselves into the still wet mud at watering holes and wait. They dig themselves in deep enough so that when it does rain again it has to rain enough to wet right down to them so that it’s wet enough for them to complete their life cycle, to breed and die, while the tadpoles have a good chance of reaching maturity.

See how intelligent nature is? And science thinks it’s a numerical accident or a rational matter, bloody nonsense. What do you think enables the numbering or the rational? Could it be intelligent nature? Yours and mine?

And while they are hibernating, if they are hibernating for a long time, they shed their skin, in layers. Not because they are growing out of it but because they are drawing nourishment from it, and at the same time cocooning themselves from the pressures of their existence. They digest themselves from the outside in. Trusting without trust rain will come. And rain always comes.

They are able to do this because the frog is being the sensation of frog, the knowledge of frog. And so wasting absolutely no energy. Frog doesn’t think about where frog has been or what frog has done or not done. Or what is not frog. And frog does not think about the future, ‘God, I hope it rains soon or I’m going to dry out’. Frog doesn’t get anxious. Frog is frog.

Sweet little thing to me. RIMG1407.JPG (RIMG0891 + 1046 + 1216.JPG)